Govt to set up centre of excellence for cyber security in Bhubaneswar

The state government has decided to set up a centre of excellence (COE) for cyber security to help police personnel effectively deal with the challenges posed by cyber crooks. The state-owned Odisha Computer Application Centre (OCAC) is planning to set up the centre of excellence in Bhubaneswar to cater to the needs of the state police.

The proposed COE will have cyber intelligence, investigation and forensic units along with tools, technology, process, and trained manpower to combat the cyber criminals. One of the key aspects of this project is to have an effective cyber security workforce to help the police personnel in investigating cyber crimes.

“We have already floated an expression of interest and have received offers from some private IT companies. Their offers are being evaluated,” OCAC’s joint general manager (technical) Saroj Kumar Tripathy said.

The broader objective of the proposed centre of excellence is to strengthen the future cybersecurity environment by expanding cyber education, coordinating and redirecting research and development efforts across the government departments. The COE will conduct planning, designing, and analysing cyber security capacity building programme for the government of Odisha.

The COE will have a centralised analytics platform to capture data from various sources and analyse them to provide actionable intelligence to the law enforcement agencies. Data obtained from various sources can be utilised to determine the relationships that exist in the data through various analytical engines, finding a solution for crime detection.

The centralised analytics platform can help cops identify illegal activities being carried out in deep and dark web such as drugs, human trafficking, credit card frauds and fake passports. The platform can also identify rumours and fake or provocative materials circulated on social media.

The state, which reported 1,931 cybercrime cases in 2020, saw a marginal increase in 2021 with the police registering 2,037 cases, clocking nearly 5.5% rise.

In bulk of the cases, cyber crooks took away money from the victims by offering them high returns through different schemes, on purchases of pharmaceutical products, during online trading, installation of mobile towers and while sending gift parcels from abroad. In some cases, people lost money from their accounts after clicking on malicious links sent by the scammers to their phones and emails.