NEW DELHI: The Information Technology Act, 2000, is being amended with a view to providing legal framework covering certain types of cyber crimes such as data theft, transmission of images and video voyeurism.

This was stated by Dayanidhi Maran, Minister for Communications and Information Technology while speaking at the seminar on "Cyber crime: Today and tomorrow", organised by the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), here on Wednesday. The major cyber crimes reported in India are denial of services, defacement of websites, SPAM, computer virus and worms, pornography, cyber squatting, cyber stalking and phishing.

Mr. Maran said the amended Act would further envisage appointing an examiner to examine the digital evidence and render all necessary assistance to the police authorities, as well as to the courts. Owing to lack of training of the police officials in the field, many of the cyber crimes in the country were booked under the Indian Penal Code, rather than the Information Technology Act. He said that while computers were used to commit acts of blue-collar crimes such as pornography, threatening e-mail and defamation, the same computers were made the target of crime in the form of viruses, worms, industrial espionage, software piracy and hacking of websites and the like. "Websites with the addresses co.in and gov.in mostly fall prey to the targets as about 1,400 Indian websites have been attacked in the first half of this year alone. The intrusion originates both from within the country and outside the country,'' Mr. Maran said.

The Minister further said the Government, on its part, had taken a number of initiatives. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) was operational and provided necessary assistance to prevent security breaches. It was also regularly monitoring the cyber security scenario in the country to protect critical information infrastructure.

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