NEW DELHI: The Union Home Ministry has instructed all state and UT police chiefs to encourage organising hackathons regularly to develop new innovative technologies for speedy disposal of cases and build capacity in the virtual segment to deal with increased instances of cyber attacks and OTT related crimes.
“Though the police of different states have been organising hackathons, the move assumes importance amid directives from the Prime Minister’s Office to proactively organise hackathons to promote young talents and use their capabilities to develop better software and platforms to crack complex cases and also deal with the increase instances of cyber security breaches,” source in the ministry said.
“Hackathons are very imaginative way where professional are invited not only to create new innovative software, but also try and breach the security of a system to try and find out about the vulnerabilities and then go ahead and fix those gaps and make the system more cyber secure,” says SC lawyer and cyber law expert Pavan Duggal.
While Karnataka state police is preparing to organise a two-day hackathon this month at IIT Bangalore, offering a Rs 50,000 reward for the winner, the TN police which organised a similar event in December 2022, using the coding skills of the participants in cracking cases.
“Hackathons primarily focus on subjects like crowd sourcing of records, fraud app detection, criminal spotting using facial recognition, fraud app detection among others, using tools like artificial intelligence, machine learning data science etc.,” said an MHA official.
Hackathons are definitely a good way of capacity building especially in an age where cyber security is a big challenge with cybercrime, including hacking, ransomware attack, personal data breach and cyber fraud happening every 11 seconds, Duggal added.
While government organisation and key Indian Institutions continue to be under constant threat and attack like the recent AIIMS episode, the Jamtara like model have now proliferated in multiple pockets of the country, with Mathura, Mewat and Bharatpur being the new epicentres of cyber fraud.