Pune emerging capital of cybercrime: Expert

IT evangelist Deepak Shikarpur warned that Pune was slowly becoming the capital of cybercrimes.

Shikarpur who, along with advocate Vaishali Bhagwat, has come out with a new book, “Cybercrimes – Technology’s Menace of the 21st Century”, said: “With the advent of social media, cheaper smart devices are available with the common man and the average age of IT users has dropped significantly. We do not have the concept of cyber ethics as well as a guide and regulatory mechanism in schools for promoting the right things and preventing wrong doings,” he said.

He said that out of curiosity and fun, many young users try to undertake cyber adventures, which can lead to cybercrimes. “Hence, the common man needs to show care and concern about this new-age crime. It is shocking that Pune is becoming the capital of cybercrimes,” he added.

“The steady rise in the number of cybercrime cases being handled by me provided a new learning  experience on the scope and limitations of the IT Act, modus operandi and  mindset of cyber criminals, hurdles faced during investigation and the suffering of victims. While conducting these cases, I kept thinking of writing about them so that a general audience could benefit from the learning, and thus was inspired to write this book,” Bhagwat said.

The book is interspersed with real-life cases of victims who suffered due to the consequences of these cybercrimes, which are a new threat to digital society. Each chapter is dedicated to the various forms of these crimes, namely, online scams,  internet banking fraud, spamming and data theft, cyber stalking and sexual harassment and so on.

Shikarpur further said he has  been writing books for almost a decade and had co-authored a book on Cyberlaws in 2003. “Cybercrimes were in an infancy stage then. With the advent of social media, cheaper smart devices are now available with the common man and the average age of IT users has dropped significantly,” he noted.

“The idea of this book is to spread awareness amongst common users about cybercrimes and this is perhaps one of the first books with case studies on cybercrimes taking place around us. This book will be read by IT students and will inspire some Universities to start a course on ‘Cyber Crime and IT Security,” said Shikarpur.