A special team, headed by DCP Harsha and ACP Subbanna, was formed on Sunday that would coordinate with the Cyber Crime Department to investigate the origin of the text messages and internet data that allegedly contained threat to the people from Northeast.
The police had seized four mobile phones, two laptops and a hard drive from the three accused who owned the New Fonotech at Koramangala seventh Block on Saturday.
“These equipment have been handed over to the COD (Crime Investigation Department) and the Cyber Crime Department has assigned the case to a special officer who will be investigating the case. While we await this investigation report, we are also tracking down other accused in this case. Those taken into custody will be interrogated as well,” said Subbanna.
Experts from the Cyber Crime Department believe that with the latest technology available in the state, it would take barely a few days for the Karnataka Cyber Crime Department to track down the origin of this rumour. “Karnataka Cyber lab based in Mangalore is the brain behind all the technical cyber crime expertise that is available in almost all departments of the government and law enforcing bodies,” said M N Vidyashankar, former principal secretary, IT BT and e-Governance department of the State.
Meanwhile, S Murugan, Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIGP), CID, explained that while the process of tracking down the origin of any data is not very difficult with the current technology, it sure would be a time consuming task to verify whether the original message was modified while being circulated.
“Once we get some leads, requests would be made to service providers to furnish details of a particular data. Usually, there is a chain as there are different service providers involved and the more the data is circulated, the more links are established,” the deputy inspector of general explained.
“As opposed to two years ago, today we have latest tools to analyse mobile phones. Even if a person deletes the SMS we can recover it, regardless of the mobile equipment used. A service provider doesn’t eavesdrop on users but if they want to gain access to the contents of a message to facilitate investigations, they surely can,” he said.