India launches CyPAD to fight against cybercrime

As per the recent reports, Union Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, on Monday launched a national cyber forensic lab and the Delhi Police’s cybercrime unit known as ‘CyPAD’ to enhance the cybersecurity and to protect the country from cybercrime.

The Minister stated that cybercrime is being arrayed by a group of terrorists and therefore cybercrime is one of the “biggest threat to digital India.”

The Cyber Protection Awareness and Detection Centre (CyPAD) and the lab are both situated in the same complex in Dwarka’s Sector 16 C of the National Capital. The national cyber forensic lab (NCFL) is a component of the Union Home Ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C).

The CyPAD is a combination of a contemporary and wide-ranging facility whose major motive is to render various services such as cyber investigation, cyber forensics, cyber safety and security-related services to the residents of the country and also to the police department along with related agencies across the Capital, Delhi.

Mr. Singh added that “they have a zero-tolerance policy towards cybercrime. He said that cybercrime is a challenge to basic policing and this facility will help curb it.”

Amulya Patnaik, Delhi Police Commissioner, stated that “It is the first cybercrime awareness and detection center opened in the country. To be selected by the MHA to host the cyber forensic lab is a great moment of pride. The entire range of cyber forensic will be covered under CyPAD. We are selecting the staff on the basis of their technical qualification and their computer knowledge.”

He also said that “We are now equipped with technology to recover data from damaged hard disks, cryptocurrency analysis, malware forensic and data can be retrieved from 33,000 kinds of mobile models available in the market. Cyber experts will train our staff.”

The cyber forensic lab comprises of various units such as Memory Forensics Labs, Image Enhancement Lab, Network Forensics Lab, Malware Forensics Lab, Cryptocurrency Forensics Lab, Damaged Hard Disk and Advanced Mobile Forensics Lab.

M.M. Oberoi, Special CP (Special Cell) stated that “the NCFL will help officers detect cyberfraud and in the future, the facility will prove to be an asset for the police.”

Mr. Singh has personally visited the centers of various labs and reviewed the illustrations that reveal their ability of the Cyber Simulation Training and Open Source Threat Analytics. In the event, he also recognized the technology that has been deployed to verify the genuineness of the video and crop images of doubtful nature from low-quality videos. The inaugural function also witnessed the involvement from various academic and technical institutions which include IIT-Delhi, National Law University, DTU, NSIT, etc. The event was also attended by Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal.