Union minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju (File)
Last week, police on the outskirts of Beijing wore smart glasses, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), helping them to pick up registration plates of vehicles, and match them in real-time with the database of suspects. In Delhi, the “emerging trend of AI” in analysing data to fight crime and terrorism was taken up during a two-day conference attended by police chiefs from Asia Pacific, who discussed “policing challenges in 2020”.
Chiefs of police from China and Pakistan, however, were not present at the conference, which concluded on Thursday.
Minister of State (Home) Kiren Rijiju, while illustrating recent cyber attack cases at Union Bank of India and City Union Bank, said, “The existing frameworks, programmes and tools are often too slow and bureaucratic to allow for a timely and effective response.”
Officials at the meeting said while radicalisation, counter-terrorism and terrorist financing were the core issue, use of AI was touted as the future to fight crime and terrorism considering that law enforcement and intelligence agencies generate overwhelming data but it is of no use when it comes to predictive policing.
The session moderated by Dr Partha Pratim Talukdar, assistant professor, department of computer science, IISC Bangalore, discussed that AI will aggregate critical threat data into actionable intelligence by creating a common framework and format this data to be effectively analysed by human investigators and learning machines. This will also overcome format inconsistencies and relieve the investigators of the task of decoding and reformatting the data before any effective analysis can begin, the session discussed.
However, it was argued that in the absence of proper data protection safeguards, AI may lead to unexpected results.
Speaking on the second day, Rijiju drew comparison between two cyber crime incidents to illustrate the sophisticated and amateurish ways.
In the first case, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT)-based malware attack was reported in two Indian Banks — Union Bank of India where 171 million USD was wiped out and City Union Bank in which 2 million USD was lost and only a part of it could be recovered.
“In the first case, a bank employee opened an email attachment, which looked like it had come from RBI. The attachment initiated the malware that hackers used to steal the bank’s access code for SWIFT, a system that lenders use for international transactions. The codes were used to send transfer instructions for about 170 million USD to Bank’s account at Citi Group Inc in New York. However, bank recovered the money. In the other case, money was transferred to accounts in Dubai, Turkey and China. In this case, a part of the amount is yet to be recovered”.
In the second instance, Rijiju said, school students in Jamtara used simple techniques and obtained data like PIN number, card CVV, and transferred money to e-wallets and then to bank accounts.
He said need of the hour was to evolve a better information sharing mechanism for police across countries. “Without such international cooperation, it would be extremely difficult for a country to address the new-age policing single-handedly.”
NSA Ajit Doval, on the first day of the seminar, urged police chiefs from various countries to set up an informal mechanism for sharing information and intelligence considering the criminals committing crime in cyber space are not bound by any jurisdictions.