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GETTING READY FOR ONLINE SECURITY INVASION
By M H AHSAN
With the growth of IT and ITES and Internet penetration it is inevitable that crimes related to this are also on the increase. What was so far limited to Pakistani hackers, has now spread to other countries like Germany, Russia, Turkey, etc, countries encouraging them to take possession of the Indian workstations without the users' knowledge.
India is one among the worst affected countries due to hacking, says Zakhi Qureshy, chairman and managing director of E2 Labs, a Hyderabad-based software company.
E2 Labs tied up with a Jharkhand-based National Anti-Hacking Group (NAG) and Global Ethical Hackers' Association (GEHA), non-profit organisations founded by will you believe, an 18-year-old ethical hacker Vineet Kumar, to bring awareness about information security and to reduce cyber crimes in India.
"Hundreds of Indian websites with domain extensions - .co.in, net.in, .gov.in, .org.in, .nic.in, ernet.in, etc., including the ones related to key government departments, are hacked every day and most of them are defaced. It's not a surprising fact that many Internet users are not aware of what is a virus," says Qureshy.
E2 Labs, reportedly, is planning to launch a nationwide campaign through seminars, training programmes and security summits in different cities across India. The 10,000 registered software professionals of GEHA will assist in conducting these seminars.
"We are also planning to conduct International Information Security Summit on September 11, 12 and 13 in India. Though we have not decided on the venue for the summit, either Hyderabad or New Delhi could be the place. It depends on the respective governments from whom we are expecting some kind of support to conduct this summit," Qureshy adds.
Speaking of the security aspects related to credit cards Qureshy says, "E-commerce is a failure in India because of information insecurity. We believe in a restaurant owner or a retail shopkeeper more than the Internet security system. But what many credit card users do not know is that their information, which can be captured through swiping machines, can be misused and the credit card can be emptied. There is very little awareness on security aspects in India."
The employment opportunities for the Internet security experts, thus are witnessing a boom.
According to NASSCOM reports India requires 5,00,000 security experts. But the number of trained professionals available to face the online security invasion if not to give it back to the invaders, is not sufficient.
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