Engg students join hands to promote cyber awareness

At a time when the cyber crime rate is on the rise, a group of budding engineers of various colleges in the city, have come together to sensitise common people and students about the emerging trends in cyber crime and assisting them with tools regarding cyber safety.

Fifteen final year engineering students have established a startup ‘RevEngg’ to create awareness about various cyber crimes. The budding engineers are conducting workshops and hands-on training programmes on handling software, which help avert hacking.

The participants were explained about social media like facebook crimes, online banking fraud, smartphone offence, crime based on internet and computers. According to co-founder of RevEngg Sharath P Patil, a majority of the victims of cyber crime are youths and people who do shopping online. Awareness regarding cyber safety is less and people, including students, need more information about the dos and don’ts, he says.

D P Smithendu, a software engineer of a private company said, “Awareness programmes about cyber security are much needed as the future in technology has arrived, when physical things are controlled through internet from a remote place, making access easy as well as prone to internet hacking. A majority of the users of social sites are unaware about private security and thus upload personal details and photos, and walk into the trap set by fraudsters.”

“Cyber security is necessary in today’s ever changing digital world, where retrieval of digital data is important, loss of which can be of a serious concern, especially when it comes to solving criminal cases,” she says.

Hackathon

The team members have conducted 17 awareness programmes in nine colleges across the state. The team has visited colleges in Hassan, Mandya, Shivamogga, Bengaluru, Tumakuru, Davangere and has provided hands-on training to the students. The team members also organise ‘Cyber Security Hackathon’.

Samarth B Bhat, founder of RevEngg, is a certified hacker. There are three types of hackers - black hat (non-ethical), grey hat and white hat (ethical). While black and grey hackers are illegal and frauds, white hackers are ethical computer hackers, security experts, who ensure the security of information systems.

The most expensive information in the world today is personal information and it is necessary to educate people on how to stop misuse of their personal information. If one shares personal information online, it is no longer private and chances of hacking are high.

Sharath said, “To learn about cyber safety, one need not be an expert in computers or internet. Simple techniques can avert one from being a victim of cyber crime. Cyber security is the technique of protecting computers, networks, programmes, data and devices which can be accessed through internet from unauthorised access or attacks that are aimed for exploitation of data.”

“The awareness programme serves two purposes — it gives a wide exposure to students on various methods of preventing hacking and also inform them how digital data can be accessed through internet or by any means, which serves the necessity for the person to know how to hack the digital data and prevent it,” said a participant.