Centre plans ‘mobile suite’ app to identify malwares

New Delhi: In a major move aimed at putting a check on online financial frauds, the government is coming out with a robust strategy put a check on malware-based online frauds as the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) has developed a ‘mobile production suite’ to find out the availability of any type of malwares in smartphones.

While talking to Millennium Post, Rajesh Kumar, who is the CEO of Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, said that the ‘mobile production suite’ would help in identifying the presence of malware in smartphones that would help in stopping the incidents of online financial frauds.

“As UPI-based transactions have become a popular instrument of financial transactions, cyber criminals use different modus operandi to commit financial frauds. To put a check on such incidents, the government is working on developing software to identify the scamsters quickly,” said Kumar -- a 2002-batch IPS officer of Telangana cadre.

He further added that the software would help in tracking the route of money transactions, which is being done by cyber criminals through different accounts to transfer the siphoned money to foreign destinations.

Stressing that awareness is the one of the most important tools to prevent cyber crimes, Kumar said, “One should never click on any suspicious links sent through mail or message as people fall prey to the tricks of cyber criminals by opening those messages or links with lucrative offers. When a user clicks on those links, a duplicate page gets created, which would appear very “original” in appearance and scamsters get all the details even the OTP sent on the victim’s phone and withdraw the money from the account.”

“Now, cyber fraudsters are using malware to commit the crime. In this case, the victim don’t even get any OTP as cyber criminals create an identical duplicate page, which is very tough for a user to differentiate between fake and original and till

the time, the user get to know about the fraud, scamsters get away with the hard-earned money,” the MHA official said.

“We are launching awareness campaigns among masses in rural areas as well as in urban cities through different means of communication. People are being aware that they should not click or open any unknown message or link,” he said, adding that besides, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, which

functions under the Ministry of Home Affairs, has started white listing ‘genuine’ number of most of the companies through Google so that consumers can at least verify the number of concerned agency/company once they get any suspicious call.

“The move to white list original numbers is being done in coordination with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY),” he said, while talking on the sidelines of the launch of KAVACH-2023, a national level hackathon, on Thursday.

“If one gets any suspicious mail, message or call and there is fraud reported by the person, it should be reported to the cybercrime cell as it helps in tracking cyber criminals,” he added.