IIT-K develops virtual system to fight cyber crime

Kanpur: In a first-of-its-kind initiative, a virtual investigator will guide the police, from catching cybercriminals to helping convict them in a court of law.

The initiative is backed by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K). The fight against spiralling cases of cybercrime will begin in Telangana and will consequently move to other states.

Prof. Manindra Agarwal, head of the state-of-the-art C3iHub of IIT Kanpur, has developed AI-backed tools for the Telangana police that will serve as a step-by-step guide for the police from commission to conviction, like an investigator.

The system that has not been named yet, has a robust database of all patterns of cybercrimes, which it would automatically classify.

When a crime takes place, the system will direct the police to cases in the past with similar or near identical modus operandi. It would throw up details of people arrested for those crimes and areas from where they have been operating.

“This system will self-analyse and suggest to the police the nature of information they need to process and gather to trace the people behind the crime,” said Agrawal.

The tools developed will even help the police build a solid case against the criminals arrested, he said.

“At present, the Telangana police is the readiest force in terms of infrastructure and trained manpower. It will shortly start using these tools that will be constantly upgraded to pre-empt cybercriminals employing new techniques and technology, After this, technology will be shared with other states,” he stated.

C3iHub is into building a cybersecurity ecosystem for the government. It will constantly monitor security vulnerabilities in critical sectors and develop tools to address them at different levels of system architecture.

Other than this, the hub does a cybersecurity audit for the government and provides a security operation control mechanism that allows the user to see information about cyberattacks on servers, flow of malware, among other things, in real time.