The Hindu Business Line : Google to help fight cyber crimes

Delhi Cyber Crime Investigation Cell is in talks with Goggle to set up a mechanism for providing information that would speed up the process of cyber crime investigation. A high-level team from Google's headquarters in the US is likely to visit India next week and discuss the matter with the cyber crime investigation cell here.

"Currently, Yahoo, Rediff have local servers as a result of which we are able to track the required data in case of any event of cyber crimes. Despite hotmail not having a local server, Microsoft is active in pursuing cases relating to cyber crimes. However, with Google also likely to set up some mechanism for tracking local information, we expect this would speed up the process of investigation in cases incurred on gmail and orkut," said ACP, Mr S.D. Mishra, Cyber Crime Investigation Cell, Delhi.

Phishing increases

While China had made it mandatory for Internet Service Providers to locate their servers within that country, in India it is not the case, said Mr Mishra. Therefore, it is difficult to gather data of criminals in certain cases, he added. There has been five-fold increase in the number of cyber crimes, including phishing, online credit frauds among others in the last one year, added Mr Mishra.

Further, the cyber crime investigation cell also plans to initiate talks with the IT heads of banking institutions to incorporate practices through which activities on proxy servers can also be monitored.

As per a report released by Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) in September, India was among the top ten countries where sites involved in `phishing' were hosted the most. While the US had the largest number of such websites (35.5 per cent), India had managed to take the tenth spot (1.66 per cent), according to the report.

Other countries, which were in the top 10 list included China (second highest after the US), Korea, Japan, France, Canada and Germany. The APWG also reported that the number of crimeware-spreading sites, globally, has surged to an all-time high in June with 2,945 such sites detected by its researchers — up 40 per cent from May and nearly 10 per cent higher than the previous record.