In a span of 13 months, cyber scamsters allegedly swindled people out of over Rs 335 crore even as the Haryana Police’s cyber cell is now scrambling to identify the conmen and put them behind bars. The cell’s priority is also to put on hold the fraudulent transactions and recover the swindled money from the possession of the accused.
From January 1, 2022, to December 31, 2022, the cyber cell received over 66,784 complaints in which the complainants alleged that they were duped of Rs 301,48,30,788 (approx Rs 301 crore). Taking cognisance of the complaints, the cyber cell has so far managed to put the transactions on hold or recover Rs 46,91,10,031 (approx Rs 47 crore).
Out of these over 66,784 complaints, 33,532 complaints are pending and under process, while 31,087 have been disposed of.
Also, 2,165 criminal cases have been registered and more than 1,065 people have so far been arrested in these criminal cases.
In January 2023, another Rs 34.80 crore has allegedly been swindled by cyber scamsters, out of which the cyber cell has been able to recover over Rs 2.78 crore. In this month, 166 criminal cases were registered of which 61 accused have so far been arrested.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on February 8 reviewed the law and order situation in the state and expressed concern about growing cyber crimes.
“Cyber crime has become a threat not only to individuals but also to the government sector, thus endangering national security,” Khattar had said while chairing the law and order review meeting that was attended by state’s home minister Anil Vij and top police officers of the state.
Haryana Police department is being technologically strengthened to meet the ongoing challenges posed by cyber crimes. The state police is opening new cyber police stations and will also be launching a special awareness drive across the state telling people about the safety tips and precautions that are required to be taken to avert cyber frauds.
Officials told The Indian Express that in the last 13 months, over 1.81 lakh calls have been received on the cybercrime helpline number 1930. Till February 4 this year, the cyber cell had got over 22,444 bank accounts of suspected cyber criminals blocked and are initiating further action. Over 30,029 mobile phone numbers that were allegedly being used to commit cybercrimes have been uploaded on the “Cyber Safe” Portal for blocking, while a technical opinion is being sought from the central agencies/experts through CyCord Portal in 236 cases.
The cyber cell has also analysed that the cyber criminals are using “Rainbow Table Attacks” for hacking passwords.
“Rainbow table attack is a password hacking method that involves using rainbow hash tables. Whenever a password is stored on a system, it’s encrypted using a ‘hash’. In order to bypass this, hackers maintain directories that record passwords and their corresponding hashes, often built from previous hacks. Rainbow tables make password cracking much faster than earlier methods, such as brute-force attacks and dictionary attacks. Rainbow tables store a pre-compiled list of all possible plain text versions of encrypted passwords based on a hash algorithm,” an officer said.
Explaining the modus operandi, a senior official said, “As password databases are often poorly secured, criminals are able to gain access to leaked hashes in order to carry out rainbow table attacks. The process is simplified as a search-and-compare operation, as all of the values in a rainbow table are already computed. In rainbow table attacks, the exact password doesn’t need to be known. Authentication is possible as long as the hash matches. Such attacks are specific to given password hash and password types. The sheer volume of possible combinations means rainbow tables can be enormous, often hundreds of gigabytes in size. Rainbow table attacks are possible on various kinds of passwords such as 8&9-character new technology LAN Manager passwords; and cyber criminals steal password hashes and decrypt the passwords of every user from a web application/network which is using outdated password hashing techniques.”
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Varinder BhatiaVarinder is Deputy Resident Editor, The Indian Express, Chandigarh. Wi… read more
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