GUWAHATI: Meghalaya Police will soon have a cyber forensic laboratory and training centre to equip the security force to tackle cyber crimes and speed up investigations against rumour mongers on social networking sites.
“A cyber forensic laboratory and training centre will be set up under a central scheme. A committee under the chairmanship of additional director general of police (CID), BL Buam has been formed and the details in regard to the facilities would be discussed in a meeting soon,” D N Jyrwa, superintendent of police (State Crime Records Bureau) told The Shillong Times on Wednesday.
An expeditious and effective mechanism to check cyber crimes is the need of the hour in the wake of the recent unrest in Shillong ignited by false reports on social media about a gurudwara being attacked. The perpetrators are yet to be traced though.
“Internet services have since been suspended and we are tracking those involved in spreading such rumours. We have sent a request to the service provider,” Jyrwa said.
However, challenges are there for the state police as curbing such crimes requires information sharing and coordination with various departments and internet service providers.
“We have to coordinate with organisations such as the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) as social media and cyber crime is a vast subject. Besides, we have to take indirect measures to find the source. For instance, in terms of WhatsApp messages, end-to-end encryption (only the communicating users can read the messages) is there and hence surveillance is difficult,” the SP (SCRB) said.
The police force, it may be noted, had set up an assistance cell to deal with cyber crimes two years back but things have not moved on at the right pace because of both technical and manpower limitations.
“We are still developing that facility. Here it would be fair to say that our information technology capacity is not up to mark and we have a limited number of trained people based only at the headquarters. So they have to go to the districts to train others. But we are picking good people and training them,” Jyrwa said.
Neighbouring Assam however is equipping itself against the challenge of deciphering cyber criminals. The Special Branch of Assam police will have a high tech centre for cyber security and innovation to effectively tackle such crimes in all the districts.
The project, Cyberdome will be launched by the end of this month and there will be a trained officer in each district for cyber crime vigilance.