An unprecedented event took place last week that shook the Karnataka High Court. Unidentified miscreants hacked into the video-conferencing platform that enables lawyers, litigants and judges to hear cases online. They then displayed pornographic content that was visible to all who were signed in. This happened while judges were hearing cases in some of the courtrooms, forcing Chief Justice of Karnataka, Justice Prasanna B Varale, to announce the suspension of live-streaming and video-conferencing of hearings for a few days. The incident is a reminder of how vulnerable people and digital tools are to those seeking to use mischief to put spokes in the wheels to derail processes. It highlighted how easy it is to do so, targeting even the judiciary.
This happened just three days after another event wherein some other unidentified miscreants issued bomb threat mails with communally abusive content to 68 schools in Bengaluru's urban and rural regions, causing chaos when panic-stricken parents rushed to take their children home. The threats proved to be hoaxes after the police scanned each and every school that had received the mail, but the miscreants had their day—another case proving society’s vulnerability in front of the digital domain’s ability to spread panic. The perpetrators in the two cases have neither been traced nor identified.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 65,893 cybercrimes were registered across India in 2022, a 24.4 per cent increase over 2021. There have been big surges in cyber crimes of all hues—display of illegal content, online scams, phishing, identity theft, cyber-stalking and using botnets. Karnataka has among the highest numbers of registered cybercrime cases. And the conviction rate is very poor—most of the perpetrators use elusive virtual private networks and proxy servers, and remain unidentified and untraceable. Global assessment of cyber security indicates that there are 2,200 cyber attacks per day—one every 39 seconds. It is estimated that cybercrime could cause losses to the tune of a whopping $10.5 trillion by 2025 around the world. The grave situation and forecast calls for central and state authorities to refine their technologies to trace the culprits and raise the conviction rate to build credible deterrence, besides spreading awareness among the masses on how to remain safe in cyber domains with no scope for gullibility.