Cyber crimes to rise in future with easily-accessible internet, says Amit Shah

NEW DELHI: The government’s cyber crime reporting portal has registered over 13 lakh complaints, including more than 2,00,000 reports related to social media, said Union Home Minister Amit Shah while addressing a national conference on cyber safety and national security at Vigyan Bhavan on Monday.

He said that while misuse of the cyber space was not new, challenges such as malware attacks, data theft, online fraud, child pornography have grown manifold. Furnishing comparative figures to establish the challenges that investigating agencies were up against, Shah said that the cumulative reported cyber crimes cases in 2012 stood at 3,377, which jumped to 50,000 by 2020. While, 136 cases were registered daily in 2020, the offences per one lakh population increased by a staggering 270 percent in four years.

Warning that the volume of cyber crimes would increase in the coming years as 800 million Indians have an online presence – an additional 400 would enter the digital world by 2025 – Shah said that this increase has mainly been because of a spike in Internet connections.

“While the challenges are many, the home ministry is aware of the preventive measures that need to be taken to ward off potential and actual threats,” Shah said, adding that the MHA’s Cyber and Information Security Division, has been working to strengthen cyber security and to deter, detect and prevent online crimes.