Game’s up for cyber criminals as Chennai cops turn to AI for live-tracking

Five minutes. That’s all the police will need to track, map and crack a complicated phishing or hacking case that comes to them from now on. The city police is setting up an artificial intelligence-driven cyber crime lab at the commissionerate at Vepery. Breaking into the dark web and virtual private networks will be a breeze for them in addition to live-tracking of mobile phones thanks to next generation gadgets loaded with modern networked software, which will be onboarded with the cyber crime wing shortly.

With close to 90 per cent of cases reported in the city linked to cybercrime, the new cyber lab is designed to support police in cracking cases even before the culprits can erase or mask their online trail or get away.

Till now, tracking of a mobile number or trailing movement of a culprit using phone location used to take a couple of days. That will be history when the cyber lab opens. All that police have to do is to enter a mobile phone number or an IP address, and the software will fish out and present the digital footprint of a culprit in the form of data or a graph. The results will be projected on huge digital screens which will help a team of police officers to track live and coordinate with the team on the ground to move in and make the arrest on the lines of the practice followed by sophisticated police force and military in Western countries.

The cybercrime laboratory, being constructed for 5.6 crore, will be operationalises by the end of this month. At least four professional software engineers will be roped in initially to assist cybercrime wing personnel.

The new-genaration computers and cyber protools outsmart the old technology by providing results in a jiffy.

Acknowledging the recent cases cracked by the cybercrime police, police commissioner Shankar Jiwal said, “The apprehension of two conmen – Hussaini and Arman – for posing as actor Arya and swindling ₹65 lakh from a Sri Lankan woman settled in Germany, the arrest of two Nigerian nationals Cletus Ikechukwu and Paulinus Chikeluo for cheating a woman posing as a doctor from the Netherlands and collecting 4.40 lakh from her shows the relevance of information technology in solving crime these days.”

Apart from tracking suspects, the tool would also help cops restore deleted messages, photos and videos without physically accessing the gadgets. The exclusive laboratory is coming up on the ground floor of the annexe building at the commissioner office in Vepery. The interior work is underway and the installation of gadgets are in full swing, said a police officer. The laboratory will be inaugurated by this month-end by chief minister M K Stalin.