16 January,2022 08:30 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
Alleged computer hacker Lauri Love, who was charged with hacking the computer networks of the US Army, Missile Defense Agency, NASA and other agencies, at the High court in central London to challenge his extradition to the US in 2017. Pic/Getty Images
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In an ongoing investigation of controversial apps developed for auctioning Muslim women - especially journalists - online, several arrests have taken place in the past few days following outrage on social media. The culprits included freelance web developer Aumkareshwar Thakur from Indore, who allegedly created the Sulli Deals app that listed hundreds of Muslim women for auction by sourcing their morphed pictures, Niraj Bishnoi, the alleged creator of a similar app called Bulli Bai in Assam and Shweta Singh, Mayank Rawal and Vishal Kumar Jha. In light of this brewing conversation around cyber safety, Dr Gaurav Gupta and Dr Garima Gupta's book Cyber Unsafe: A Handbook for Preventing Computer Frauds and Cyber Crimes (Vilvam Publications India Private Limited) proves particularly useful.
mid-day spoke to Gupta, who is the first Indian to earn a doctorate in the field of digital forensics, about his book.
In 2001, Gupta joined as a research scholar at the Central Forensics Science Laboratory, Hyderabad to work in the area of cyber crime investigation. This was a time when not much was happening in India given its narrow scope of digitalisation, he says, with few and simple frauds like theft of a company's source code or internet time stealing. Gupta who did his doctorate at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and keen to anticipate criminal behaviour, developed steganographic solutions and ways of detecting counterfeit documents made by printers. With the pandemic fuelling more frauds with people's increased technological dependence, he was convinced of the need to reach more people.
"Cybercrime is the fastest growing type of crime across the world. Technology is invading our day to day activities from ordering food to online classes," says Gupta, explaining that these crimes have increased for two reasons - people's need for convenience, which is being provided by technology, and their innate trust-worthy nature. "They believe that nothing bad can happen to them, and their emotions like trust, greed and fear are being exploited by criminals," says Gupta, who was aided in this project by his younger sister Garima, an expert in the area of psychology and special education. "The idea was to offer myth-busting, non-technical advice through relatable stories, which will educate people on how to avoid cyber crimes."
A most vulnerable frontier and key to the raging Bulli Bai app controversy is the centrality of social media in our lives. "When you are posting your photo on Twitter or Facebook, you are not only posting your photo, but also the GPS coordinate of that particular photograph, and information like what kind of camera you use, its resolution and make, which means you are revealing your address and that you are wealthy if you are using an iPhone," Gupta tells us. "Again, when you are posting say, that you are going to Goa for a week, it tells a potential criminal that the house whose location you posted earlier through a different photo is empty and primed for a robbery." Social media then is being used by criminals to mine information about individuals even as SM platforms themselves collect information on their users. "What I do typically is that every three or six months, I go to the Google timeline, download all the data offline and then delete it from there so that in case of my device being stolen, nobody can see my data on Google. What everyone must understand is that everybody is important, everybody's data is important and everybody has assets that criminals are after," he insists. "Even if you don't have a lot of money and you think you are not important, your data is important." People can also hack into your systems to use your computing resources, your electricity and bandwidth to carry out activities like bitcoin mining, he warns, insisting on the importance of cyber hygiene.
This makes it among 62 myths and 100 stories and scenarios that Gupta has discussed in the book.
Lack of awareness is the primary cause behind invasion of cyber privacy, says Gupta. When defrauded, people need to inform others. "But people don't tell others thinking their reputation will go for a toss. Around 95 per cent of the cyber crimes are avoidable if one can take small precautions."
Don't connect to a free Wi-Fi because it is unencrypted so what one is doing can be snooped upon by people in that network. Again, charging phones at airport kiosks might result in stealth of data or the installation of a virus or a malicious software. So, the safe way, he offers, is to not charge one's phone. Charge a power bank instead, or at least switch off the phone when charging. ATM machines are available to be bought in the market for Rs 5 lakh. A machine can record a person's card and pin and say, âno cash', and a criminal can reproduce the card and withdraw money. The simple solution is that when using an ATM machine, enter an incorrect pin once. The genuine machine will go back to the bank's server and check the pin whereas the counterfeit machine cannot connect to the server of the bank. It is programmed to say âno cash' even if it's the pin that's wrong.
