NEW DELHI: Alarmed over the spate of cyber threats to airlines and CRPF schools, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has asked the states and the Union Territories (UTs) to set up a special wing of cyber commandos in their respective police forces.
It is to be noted that in over the past week, the Indian airline operators have received more than 100 hoax bomb threats resulting in cancellation and diversions of several flights causing huge inconvenience to passengers and monetary loss to the civil aviation sector.
Sources in the agencies dealing with cases of cybercrime and fraud, have confirmed that the majority of such threats were posted on micro-blogging site ‘X’ and the accounts were created by using a virtual private network (VPN) and then chaining them to create dark web.
The modus operandi is such that agencies have not been able to detect the origin of posts, they added.
The sources said, a decision with regard to the special cyber commando wing in each of the state and UT police forces was taken by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) with an aim to improve cyber defence capabilities of the forces.
In the advisory sent to the states and the UTs, the authorities have been reminded of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s suggestion about a Special Wing of suitably trained ‘Cyber Commandos’ during the last two DGPs & IGs conferences, the sources said.
It is also informed to the state and UT authorities that the Centre has already decided to raise 5,000 Cyber Commandos over the next five years.
It is also suggested that the Cyber Commando Wing should be an integral part of the police organisations of the states and the UTs and would be deemed to be a national resource, they said.
“Prospective Cyber Commandos will be identified from among serving personnel (all ranks) in the various police organisations of the states/UTs and Central Police Organisations having basic knowledge of computer networks and operating systems,” a source quoting the advisory said.
As per the advisory, trained Commandos “will work for their parent organisation and will be expected to be assigned roles according to the expertise they had developed during training in digital forensics, incident response and securing information and communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure”, they said.
According to the sources the MHA’s I4C will be responsible for maintaining close liaison with the cyber commandos for continuous learning, upgrading knowledge and utilisation.
The MHA has already deputed the first batch of 246 Cyber commandos for six months of hands-on training at IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Kottayam, IIIT Naya Raipur, Rashtriya Raksha University (RRU) Gandhinagar, Defence Institute of Advance Technology (DIAT) Pune, National Forensic Science University (NFSU) Gandhinagar, and Delhi.