The Hindu : Front Page : Many cyber cafés still lax about user verification rules

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Thursday, Jan 31, 2008
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Many cyber cafés still lax about user verification rules

K.V. Subramanya

Police on the terror and cyber crime trail find it tough to track down culprits

Cyber café owners have to verify customers’ identity
Drive soon to ensure that they comply with norms

— Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

Difficult to monitor: Many of the customers visiting cyber cafes do not have a photo identity cards.

BANGALORE: Even as suspected terrorists and fraudsters are increasingly using Internet parlours to carry out their activities, it appears that the State police have not taken adequate measures to enforce the provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000 to prevent such incidents.

At least four cases of suspected terrorists using Internet parlours to transmit information about vital installations to their handlers abroad have been detected in the State in the past few years.

According to the Act, cyber café owners have to compulsorily verify the identities of customers and also maintain a register of people and the time during which they use the facility.

The police have to visit cyber cafés and ensure that the owners are following the rules of the Act. As the police themselves admit, many cyber cafés are not complying with the regulations. As a result, the police investigating cyber crimes are finding it difficult to trace the culprits. Several cases of miscreants using cyber cafes for committing economic fraud and pornographic rackets have been reported in recent years.

In the latest case, Ziyazuddin Nasir (22), an alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba operative arrested by the Davangere police on January 11, is suspected to have emailed the details of the Hubli airport to his accomplices from an Internet centre in Hubli. He is said to have frequented the centre at Gokul Road since he arrived in Hubli in August after undergoing arms training in Pakistan.

The first such instance came to light after a series of arrests were made in connection with serial blasts at churches in Karnataka, Goa and Andhra Pradesh in 2000. Abdul Rehman, an accused in the church blast case who is presently lodged in Parappana Agrahara prison, had used a cyber café in Vijayanagar here to email the details of several vital installations in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh to his handlers in Pakistan. The email ID that was being used by Rehman is still active, sources in the police told The Hindu.

Even Shami Ahmed Shah of Mumbai, a suspected LeT operative who was arrested by the Gulbarga police in March 2006, had used several Internet parlours in Station Bazaar area in Gulbarga and had reportedly mailed the maps of some vital installations in Andhra Pradesh. The police had taken Shah to these parlours for investigations.

Recently, officials from the Cyber Crime Police Station arrested an engineer who had allegedly hacked the Internet banking accounts of customers after stealing data from computers they had used at cyber cafés and had siphoned of lakhs of rupees from their accounts.

Joseph had operated from five cyber cafes at Mahadevapura, HAL 3rd Stage, Kalyananagar, and Old Madras Road in Bangalore and Gokulam in Mysore. He visited the cafes mainly during the first week of the month as several people frequent these centres to make online financial transactions and to check their salary accounts.

He installed “key logger” software in computers and this freely available software captures data of the subsequent users of the same terminal. During his next visit, Joseph collected account numbers, passwords and other details of the bank customers who had used the computer and hacked into accounts.

Bangalore Police Commissioner Neelam Achutha Rao told The Hindu that the police would soon launch a drive to ensure that cyber cafes complied with the regulations. It had become difficult to focus on cyber cafes as the police were busy with law and order and crime duties, he said. “If they cannot insist on identity proof, the cyber cafes should at least install web cameras,” the Commissioner said.

On the other hand, cyber café owners claim that strict enforcement will affect their business. Besides, there are practical difficulties in verifying the identity of customers, as many of them do not have a photo ID card, they say.

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