The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Cyber forensics course for policemen and lawyers

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jun 30, 2005

Kerala

Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Cyber forensics course for policemen and lawyers

Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: As many as 32 policemen in the State will be trained in the use of computer forensic tools by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) here. The three-month full-time postgraduate diploma course will cover cyber crimes, cyber laws, networking and Internet, encryption and digital signatures among other related subjects.

The course is expected to help the State Police Department tackle cyber crimes such as e-mail harassment, cyber stalking and hacking of Government and private websites. The C-DAC executive director Rajan T. Joseph said the course is open to private citizens, including lawyers and graduates.

The course fee has been fixed at Rs.40,000. The national launch of the course will be done by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy at the C-DAC here on Thursday. The C-DAC director general S. Ramakrishnan will preside over the function.

G.L. Sreekanth, head, C-DAC training division, said a six-month part-time evening course in cyber forensics for employed persons would be launched soon. The faculty will include V.K. Bhadran, B. Ramani and K.L. Thomas who form the cyber forensics wing at the C-DAC here.

The wing has experience in helping law enforcement agencies, including the Central Bureau of Investigation, investigate cyber crimes such as hacking, spreading of viruses through e-mail attachments and theft of source codes of patented software programmes.

The wing was instrumental in developing three cyber forensic tools that are currently being used by several law enforcement agencies in the country. Mr. Ramani said cyber crime scenarios would be simulated to help students gain hands-on experience in tackling such crimes.

They will learn to trace e-mails, secure electronic evidence in computers and networks and also analyse electronic data from a cyber forensic point of view.

The policemen will be trained in the use of True Back, Cyber Check and E-mail tracer tools developed by C-DAC in 2002. The tools are designed to enable policemen to secure the crime scene, seize the computer, acquire the evidence, preserve the data and analyse it to trace the criminal.

The course will also deal with Internet fraud such as `work at home online schemes,' auction and retail schemes on the web, theft of cyber identity and cracking of network security software.

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