Unseen traps

Chennai, July 23: Next time you tell a colleague to get cracking, you could be asking for trouble. Especially if he is a computer expert.

He might haul you off to the boss and say he is being told to break into the company’s protected systems.

Misconceptions, “grey areas” and the challenges that face law enforcers were some of the topics that delegates talked about today at a conference here to discuss the growing world of cyber crime.

Among those present were Tamil Nadu accountant-general T. Theethan, who is also the chairman of the Cyber Society of India; S. Balu, the ACP who heads Greater Chennai police’s cyber crime cell, and N. Vijayashankar alias Naavi, an expert on cyber laws.

One point that emerged from the seminar was clear: defining cyber crime was not easy. Nor was the law meant to tackle it ? the Information Technology Act ? adequate.

While pornography and sending obscene messages and pictures through SMS make up a major segment of cyber crime, there are other complex cases, too.

Raghava, a scientist with the Structural Engineering Research Centre, a CSIR laboratory here, cited the example of an ATM of a “leading public sector bank” in Chennai that does not give immediate updates of debits and credits.

A bank official present at the talks explained that some banks were “offline” and so the “current balance was not immediately updated”. But the software that drives ATMs is generally designed in a way so that debits would immediately register, he added, conceding this was still a “grey area”.

A couple of shockers also tumbled out at the conference, organised by the Cyber Society of India and the Prime Point Foundation, a public trust.

An employee of a company revealed its computer system’s crucial password for a Cadbury’s chocolate. If that betrayed a passion for milk and cocoa, the other revealed strategic information on the Kargil war, thanks to the hard disk of an old computer that surfaced in the junk market. An army office in Kashmir had sold off the computer.

Raghava voiced concern about the difficulties in safeguarding technical data against professional hackers. The comment provoked a thoughtful response from Anantharaman Mani from IIM-Bangalore.

Mani said one should distinguish between “hacking” ? as a creative way of bringing forth multiple solutions to a problem into the public domain ? and “cracking”. Only cracking was an offence as it involved breaking into the protected systems.

While discussing cyber pornography, the participants pointed out how obscene messages and pictures were being sent by using pre-paid mobile cards bought with fictitious names. As most Net crimes emanate from cyber cafes, Balu said Chennai police has suggested to the government to make it mandatory for such centres to register names of users with addresses.