To ensure the safe and secure cyber world, the Director General of Police (DGP) Punjab Dinkar Gupta on Wednesday, announced slew of measures including recruitment of around 200 cyber crime and digital forensic experts and setting-up of Cyber Crime Units in all the districts to deal with rising cybercrimes.“Amid the COVID-19, we are living more of our lives in the cyber world and many people using online banking and students attending online classes still don’t aware about the term cybercrime,” said DGP Gupta while addressing the closing ceremony of Cyber Surakhya— an online awareness campaign via webinar.A three-month long cyber awareness campaign was the joint initiative of the Punjab Police and Cyber Peace Foundation (CPF). DGP Gupta said that the Punjab Police is committed to ensure the safe cyber world to the citizens especially to the women and children, who are more vulnerable to fall prey to cybercrime.While the recruitment of IT and Cyber Crime experts will be started from April 2021, the Cyber Crime Units are expected to be functional at district level in next 6 to 8 months, said DGP Gupta. Notably, the Punjab Police already have a state-level Cyber Crime Cell in Mohali. The DGP also stressed on the need to sensitise citizens regarding new-age cyber frauds including telephone and financial frauds, identity theft crimes (phishing), and malware detection besides assisting them to identify cyber threats and seek redressal to mitigate the threats.He said that the Punjab Police and CPF have also conducted a survey to further understand the gaps and put into place safety and response measures to fight cybercrime.
Advisor CPF Dr Rakshit Tandon, while divulging details said that 8505 respondents including 3342 males, 5101 females and 72 others, who participated in the study displayed a deep understanding on cybercrime including stealing the data from computer hardware (51%) as well as crimes such as hacking (51%), online impersonation (39%), and online harassment (38%) while 34% respondents also stated that conducting unlawful transactions from someone else’s account and spreading fake news (36%) also falls into the category of cybercrime.The survey, in which majority of respondents were in the age group between 10 to 20 years old and are school-going further showed that about 56% of them knew how to report a cybercrime and 50% of the respondents knew that cybercrime is reported at the police station, he added.He said that interestingly, 70% of respondents were also aware that Punjab Police had dedicated Cybercrime Cells besides Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and 44% of the respondents were aware that they could seek remedy against cybercrimes under the Information Technology Act, 2000.ADGP Community Affairs Division Gurpreet Kaur Deo informed that as many as 26 webinars covering diverse subjects to help citizens to understand the new age technologies and their pros-cons, were organised under this cyber awareness campaign and speakers including 22 senior police officers and 33 experts from Cyber Peace Foundation delivered lectures. She said that apart from organising webinars, competitions like Brain Olympics, Slogan Slam and Pant-a-Thon were also organised for the viewers.Meanwhile, Founder CPF Vineet Kumar said that the campaign had generated more than 20 lakh impressions in the last 3 months with over 3 lakh unique viewers, who have watched webinars during the campaign period. The webinars can also be watched anytime by visiting “Punjab Police India” page on Facebook, he added.