In a matter of months, someone sitting in New Delhi may be monitoring your SMS and e-mails. To counter cyberterror threats, the government plans to get cracking by April a Cybersecurity Emergency Response Team (CERT) India which will serve as a nodal agency for tracking cybercrimes across the country and digging their origins.The CERT will look at the vulnerability of government electronic sytems — e-governance, e-learning and e-security — to threats from hackers and denial of service rights through cyber techniques. The Prime Minister’s Office has already created five committees to go into various security issues.Ground rules are being fixed for cybercafes, which have mushroomed on streets in every city, so that a check can be kept on users and ways exist to track them down in the event of mischief. Similar to the existing arrangement which requires purchasers of cellphone pre-paid cards to furnish addresses and identity cards, cybercafes too will now be told to check antecedents of people using the internet on their premises, maintain logbooks of identities and time of use of computers.This will facilitate security agencies to zero-in on the originator of messages. Of late, there have been crimes using the internet or SMS, involving hawala transactions between Mumbai and Dubai.Instead of enacting a new law to deal with the misuse of SMS and e-mails, the government plans to issue executive orders to bring cybercafes and SMS messages under the existing laws to tackle crime.CERT India will have a counterpart in Bangalore, Mirror CERT, which will be the back-up for the Delhi operations and be on stand-by in case the former fails. CERT will also have an advisory role, functioning as a consultant to private firms to get their cyber security systems in place to prevent hacking and data tampering.
