Noting the growing incidents of online financial crimes, Home Minister Rajnath Singh has ordered strengthening of the surveillance and legal frameworks to check the menace. The issue came up at a high-level meeting on Tuesday where the strategies being adopted to check financial cybercrimes were discussed in detail.
Representatives from various agencies made presentations and apprised the Home Minister of the current trends of financial cybercrimes in the country and the steps being taken by their agencies to address this challenge, a Home Ministry spokesperson said. It was noted that both legal and technological steps need to be taken to address this situation, he added.
The Home Minister directed all concerned agencies to undertake required measures in a time-bound manner and emphasised on the coordination of all concerned agencies in this regard, the spokesperson said. It has been decided to expedite the implementation of cybercrime prevention initiatives in these agencies towards this end along with measures required to acquire critical cyber forensics equipment.
As many as 1,44,496 cyber security attacks were observed in the country in last three years. As per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a total number of 44,679, 49,455 and 50,362 cyber security incidents were observed during 2014, 2015 and 2016.
The types of cyber security incidents included phishing, scanning/probing, website intrusions and defacements, virus/malicious code and denial of service attacks. As per the data maintained by National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), a total of 5,693, 9,622 and 11,592 cyber crime cases were registered during the years 2013, 2014 and 2015, respectively, showing a rise of 69 per cent during 2013 to 2014 and 20 per cent increase during 2014 to 2015.
The meeting was also attended by Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba, secretary, department of financial services Rajiv Kumar, secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology Ajay Prakash Sawhney, director of Intelligence Bureau Rajiv Jain and Delhi Police Commissioner Amulya Patnaik among others.