Ankit Fadia believes that not many colleges in India offer courses on ethical hacking and technology awareness. He chats with Darpan Mago about his new book and cyber security issues in India
During the days when people were getting used to chatting over the Internet, it was considered the most easy and convenient way for long distance communication.
Once a lady was casually chatting with a stranger who sent her a file on the messenger that she downloaded and opened, unaware of the consequences. This resulted in infecting her computer with a Trojan.
The person, who had sent her the Trojan, remotely used that malware to switch on her webcam without her permission. Whatever was happening at her home was broadcasted live on the Internet.
“When web cameras had just entered in the market, there was no light indicator showing that the camera was on. This broadcast continued for many weeks and the lady came to know about all this from someone who had seen her online. That’s how she found out about the whole incident. This was pretty shocking that an average person, who is using the Internet for just chatting can actually be entrapped like this,” says Ankit Fadia, a cyber security consultant.
Ankit, who has been working closely with professionals and government agencies on spreading awareness on cyber security, has many such instances that have taken the veil off the sense of security over the Internet.
He mentions of visiting the National Police Academy in Hyderabad almost every quarter, where he trains IPS officer on techno-gyan.
He says, “The training starts at a very basic level. A lot of IPS officers don’t understand how to trace an email to track a criminal. I train them from this level to helping them learn how to hack servers in other countries in order to dig data. This is because cyber espionage is a great way of gathering intelligence that governments across the world have started doing.”
Ankit, who wrote his first book on ethical hacking at the age of 14, believes that India has good cyber laws but people still lack awareness.
He informs, “The government has a website dedicated to cyber awareness. Here they have provided the statistics on Indian websites that are being hacked every month. I don’t know the current exact figure but in the first four months of the year it was close to 7,000. The figure is embarrassing considering the fact that India is the IT hub of the world. From a purely awareness perspective, India is pretty low compared to other nations. Another problem is that not many colleges in India offer courses on ethical hacking. India has good cyber laws but if you go to a cyber cell in a police department to register a complaint, lot of times they don’t exactly understand what you’re talking about. Police has not been properly trained to handle and investigate cyber crimes.”
Ankit has authored nearly 15 books related to technology and cyber security issues.
He has now come up with a new book, Social: 50 ways to improve your professional life, which gives out 50 measures to use technology for enhancing one’s professional life.
“It has experiences from my own business life. We all have Internet enabled smartphones and use technology all the time, but most people don’t know how to maximise the power of technology to improve their professional life. This book offers some practical applications, tools and websites to make our professional lives more productive, cooler and better.”
The book took him nearly nine months to write and offers applications that can be downloaded to convert a mobile phone or a computer to deliver beyond entertainment needs.
“One example is that of Smarter Box. It brings work emails with a personal touch. Whoever emails you, next to that email on the right hand side, the application shows latest Twitter, linkedIn and Facebook feeds of the same person. In a company, the employer might be dealing with hundreds of people without knowing them on a personal level but if the social media feeds are displayed right next to their email it offers an opportunity to get to know them better. The interpersonal relationships between co-workers are enhanced and if we have better relationships, we will be more efficient at work.”
In contemporary times professional lives and technology have started to develop deeper linkages. Branding isn’t limited to big organisations but at individual levels as well.
like in the West, a few India companies have also started to conduct background checks on their potential employees. There have been cases of people doing something embarrassing that went online and the Google results often highlight it.
To cope up and rectify such things, Ankit says, “There is no real solution than to create positive conversations on Facebook, Twitter or blogs to have better search results gradually. So once you have more positive stuff coming up, it will overshadow the negative stories a person faces online. It is not an instant thing as Internet takes time and things change gradually.”