Today was the second (as well as last) day of conference on Homeland Security organised by FICCI, Delhi. Yesterday’s welcome address at conference was given by Dr. A. Didar Singh who is Secretary General at FICCI. Today’s session was chaired by Dr. Vivek Lall who is Co- Chair at FICCI Homeland Security Committee and also holds the post of President and CEO at New Ventures, Reliance Industries.
In the initial half of the conference there were 4 speakers, namely:
1. Mr. Muktesh Chander, Special Commissioner – Traffic, Delhi Police
2. Mr. Zori Kor, Vice President, ASERO Consulting Services, Israel.
3. Dr. Gandhi Kaza, Chairman, Truth Labs.
4. Mr. Sunny Vaghela, Director & CTO, TechDefence Consulting Pvt. Ltd.
Dr. Muktesh Chander brought various important points while giving his presentation, like how cyber crime is costing huge loss to Indian economy, how certain countries are involved in cyber crimes against other nations etc. While discussing the matters of cyber security he mentioned that Section 70 of IT Act as amended in 2008, the government can declare any computer resource to be a protected system if it directly or indirectly affects the facility of Critical Information Infrastructure. Sub-Section 3 of Section 70 of IT Act states that, if any person tries of access to a protected system against the provision of this section shall be punished with imprisonment and fine.
Now, it is worth mentioning that according to yesterday’s report of The Free Press Journal, India have highest rates of prepaid card fraud (can be accessed HERE), and as per NCRB report there has been an increase of 51.8 % in Cyber Crimes (can be accessed HERE) but not a single case is registered under Section 70 of IT Act.
Dr. Chander also suggested that a single suit cannot fit everyone means, there is an urgent need for sector specific guidelines. At last he suggested that, India should not wait for a Digital Pearl Harbour to take place. Precaution is always better than cure and India should learn a lesson from Mumbai Attack (Our security agency never anticipated such kind of attack). he also mentioned that cyber security should not be taken a secondary concern, it must be treated as subset of national security.
Mr. Zori Kor stated how Israel is handling its cyber security issues. Cyber security is a big concern for Israel because of its high vulnerability to cyber attacks. He considers Cyber Space as a new dimension of war along with land, water, air and space. His point of view is that States and Corporate entities should not think physical security of human and cyber security as two different domains. Rather both should be dealt together by establishing security circles. He advised that to built a good Cyber Security Circle, ones should think as Hackers or Bad Guys, not as Defenders. Doing so will help defenders to be innovative and they will always remain one step ahead of criminals.
Dr. Gandhi also considered Cyber Space as 5th combat zone. He emphasized more on cyber education, stating that enforcing agencies are not well equipped and do not have much knowledge about recent cyber crimes and technologies associated with them. He also brought out on of the major drawback in India cyber zone, that is lack of coordination and direct research & development facilities. He suggested that the role of central and state government should be well defined and they must act accordingly.
Law Optics 