Source code thefts, hacking on the rise

Bangalore: Cyber crimes in India are slowly evolving from a simple e-mail crime (sending obscene materials over e-mail) to more serious crimes like hacking and source code theft.

The Bangalore cyber crime police station has registered around 22 hacking cases and around five source code theft cases in the last three years. “Usually it is employees of the company who steal source code and try to sell it for easy money,” said Susant Mahapatra, IGP-Economic Offences- Corps of Detectives (CoD).

For instance, last year an employee of Zygox in Bangalore allegedly stole the source code of the product called ‘DigiBeat’, which was being developed by the company and started his own company as Techmach Engineers and developed a product called ‘E-beat’ with the source code. In another instance, an engineer from IT Must Consultancy services Pvt Ltd, allegedly stole the source code of one the company’s sports betting software. “Theft of intellectual property is increasing, “ said police official.

Intellectual property rights (IPR) of computer software are covered under the Copyright Law in 1994 in India. The Act clearly explains the rights of copyright holder, position on rentals of software, the rights of the user to make backup copies and the heavy punishment and fines on infringement of copyright of software.

If a person is convicted of hacking or IP theft, he can be convicted under either Section 66 (imprisonment for three years and a fine of Rs 1 lakh) or section 67 (five year imprisonment with Rs 2 lakh fine).

Threats from employees for an organisation doesn’t stop here. The CoD has also registered cases involving sending obscene e-mails to women colleagues from their male counterparts.

Interestingly it discovered that most cyber crime involving sending obscene messages arise from ‘triangluar love stories’ within the orgnisations.

“It is just like a Hindi movie story. When romantic attemps fails, some people start sending obscene photos by e-mail to lady colleagues as a ‘revenge’,” said police officials.

Usually such messages are sent out from cyber cafes. “With the help of internet service providers, we can trace where mails have been sent from,” said Mr Mahapatra.

While technology can even help pinpoint which computer it has been sent from, it is still not possible to identify the individual who has sent it.

The Karnataka government is planning to bring a law, where persons wanting to browse at Internet cafes will be asked for some identification (a driving licence, or identity card). The cyber centre...