The Centre has constituted seven Joint Cyber Crime Coordination Teams for cyber crime hotspot hubs like Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jamtara, Mewat and Visakhapatnam. These teams will comprise officials from the Central as well as State agencies.
Over three dozen towns and villages of nine States — from Delhi to Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat to Assam — have become cyber crime hotspots which are being closely monitored by law enforcement agencies, sources said.
A number of hostile countries have also been trying for long to cripple India’s financial system and national security grid where additional preventive measures have been put in place by the Government to offset threats, they said.
The States where the cyber crime hotspots have been located include Haryana, Delhi, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, they said.
The emerging cyber crime hotspot cities, towns and villages are: Mewat, Bhiwani, Nuh, Palwal, Manota, Hasanpur, Hathan Gaon (all in Haryana), Ashok Nagar, Uttam Nagar, Shakarpur, Harkesh Nagar, Okhla, Azadpur (all in Delhi), Banka, Begusarai, Jamui, Nawada, Nalanda, Gaya (Bihar), Barpeta, Dhubri, Goalpara, Morigaon, Nagaon (Assam), Jamtara, Deoghar (Jharkhand), Asansol, Durgapur (West Bengal), Ahmedabad, Surat (Gujarat), Azamgarh (Uttar Pradesh) and Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh).
The foreign cyber attackers mostly belong to countries like China, Pakistan and Türkiye, the sources said.
For promoting cyber hygiene, the Central and State administrations are also working on an annual action plan.
The Union Home Ministry has also decided to celebrate the first Wednesday of every month as Cyber Awareness Day.
The Centre has also allocated a grant-in-aid of Rs 100 crore for training law enforcement agencies, judicial officers, public prosecutors and recruitment of junior forensic consultants.
As part of the Government’s efforts to streamline prosecution of criminal cases in the courts, the agencies have developed an Adjournment Alert Module in the e-Prosecution application as a step towards facilitating States/Union Territories to ensure timely disposal of criminal cases.
According to the new facility, whenever a Government prosecutor seeks a stay more than twice in a criminal case, the system has a provision to send alerts to senior officers. As a way forward, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is in the process of integrating the module directly with the e-courts applications.
Under the National Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS), over one crore (1,05,80,266 records) are being integrated. As on January 31, 2023, as many as 23,378 fingerprints have been checked.