NEW DELHI: The newly formed Cyber and Information Security (CIS) Division of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has been working on a plan to set up five regional centres of the National Cyber Forensic Laboratories (NCFL) with an aim to enhance capabilities of central agencies and state police forces in their counter online fraud efforts, officials said on Monday.
According to officials one of these centres will come up in Northern, Eastern & North Eastern, Central, Western and Southern regions with an estimated cost of nearly Rs 250 crore for building required infrastructure.
Interesting here to note that a proposal has also been mooted to rename NCFL as N-DISC (National Digital Investigation Support Centre). This is being done to bring in focus the NCFL contributes to digital investigations and cybersecurity, the officials said.
The NCFL plays a key role in helping law enforcement agencies in combating cyber fraud, financial crimes, malware attacks and other cybercrimes by tracking cybercriminals and detecting online financial and other frauds, the officials said, adding that the proposed expansion of the facility will facilitate better access to information and related evidence in real time.
With ever advancing technologies, the officials said, cybercriminals deploy new and innovative tools to commit crimes and in this backdrop the country’s forensic abilities also need to keep pace by getting equipped in its battle against cyber crimes by constantly plugging in loopholes.
According to the data available with the CIS Division, the lone NCFL, since its establishment, has so far dealt with a total of over 11,200 cases. These cases included Forensic Memory Investigations like hard disks, laptops, memory cards, and encrypted documents.
With the increasing number of financial transactions through mobile phones, the NCFL has so far processed and investigated over 5,000 such handsets, the officials said, adding that it has also processed financial frauds relating to cryptocurrencies.
Besides setting up regional centres of the NCFL, the CIS Division has also been focussing on improving the capabilities of Cyber Fraud Mitigation Centre (CFMC), which is part of the I4C under the MHA.
Keeping this in mind, the CIS has roped in representatives of major banks, financial intermediaries, payment aggregators, telecom service providers, IT intermediaries, representatives of state/UT law enforcement agencies and a few other experts to work in tandem to ensure real-time and seamless action is initiated counter incidents of online crimes.
According to the MHA data till February this year, the authorities have blocked nearly 8 lakh SIM cards and 2 lakh IMEIs.
The government has also constituted seven Joint Cyber Coordination Teams (JCCTs) with a mandate for each of them to deal with cybercrime hotspots like Mewat, Jamtara, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Visakhapatnam and Guwahati.