DNA EXCLUSIVE: Government plans to hire geeks as cops in its war against cybercriminals

The government has planned to open the doors of the police force to computer professionals. To deal with increasing cybercrime and cybersecurity threats, the police across the country have been directed to raise information and technology cadre. The government has also issued a direction to set up state-of-the-art cyber police units at districts and sub-divisional level.

These tech geeks will also be involved as an "undercover agents" to infiltrate black marketplaces to identify its operators.

Sources in the Union Home Ministry said that the Director Generals of Police of states and union territories have been directed to hire cyber experts. The recruits of IT cadre would be deployed at the cyber police units which would be like any police station in the country.

The hired geeks will act as hawks in the cyberspace and probe cybercrimes. Their task would be to gather intelligence and collaborate on operations to combat crime. That would involve identifying the sophisticated perpetrators operating key criminal services in the cyber underground marketplace.

"Also the cyberspace is used by the terrorists to deal with them the IT cadre will help its ground team understand what cyber terrorism is," said an IPS officer.

"Terrorism holds an agenda often religious, cultural, social, economic and political. Also, terrorist organisations are promoting the use of computing expertise to radicalise and recruit members to carry out acts of violence and the job of the IT cadre would be to trace the recruiters," he added.

Further, their major task would be to start a crackdown on so-called darknet websites, which generally target merchants and thousands of customers. They need to identify who are looking to obtain illegal drugs, weapons, run trafficking rackets, selling goods or credit card numbers and to identify the facilitator of the child pornography. Darknet is a privileged place for cybercriminals where they operate in anonymity.

Officials said the criminals on the darknet are many steps ahead of law enforcement agencies and this has prompted the Centre to take swift action and involve geeks to catch the criminals on the web.

According to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, a statutory organisation under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, a total of 69,539 cyber incidents were dealt between April 2017 and February 2018. During this period, 55 security incident and 23,282 Indian website defacement were tracked. CERT-In is a national agency to look into all the aspect of cybersecurity.