Police is going to form a “cyber cop” division to tackle the looming social dangers of cybercrime.
Bangladesh has in the recent past experienced social unrest triggered by online provocations. The Ramu incident was triggered by a fake Facebook post, while the draft verdict in war crimes cases against BNP leader Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury was leaked on to the web, which created further unrest.
“All these are related to cybercrime and both the cases were referred to the CID for digital forensic, and we investigated the matter,” Special Superintendent of Criminal Investigation Department Sheikh MdRezaul Hyder told the Dhaka Tribune.
Hyder is the director of “Enhancing Cyber Crime Investigation Capability of Bangladesh Police” project, assisted by experts from South Korea, the number one internet dependant country in the world.
Bangladesh has 3.5 million Facebook users, 10 million smart phone users, while over 100 million use mobile phones; the more people get interconnected with the internet, the more it we are likely to experience the dangers of cybercrime, Hyder said.
Any crime related to the internet, intranet or mobile phones is a cybercrime.
“Even if somebody sends an SMS for extortion or giving threats, it is a cybercrime,” the police officer said.
Malicious mail to foreign diplomatic missions and other VIPs, pornography, use of e-mail for illegal activities, use of internet for transmitting false and malicious information, abuse of intellectual property rights, and use of internet for prostitution and women and child trafficking are common in Bangladesh.
“We are living at a time where hackers can break into systems at airports or the central banks and shut them down. These are very much possible in Bangladesh as well,” Hyder said.
Even the Nasa system in the USA has been attacked thousands of times by hackers and Bangladesh was not immune to it, he said.
Cybercrime project
The project is aimed at providing training to cybercrime investigators and develop an institution.
Korea International Cooperation Agency (Koica) had been providing necessary support as they had the technology and knowledge to fight cybercrime, Hyder said.
Under the training programme, six Bangladeshi trainers would be sent to South Korea in July for six months’ training and after their return, they and other Korean experts would train investigators in Dhaka, the police officer said.
Police would be able to provide training to about 200 people at a time in its cybercrime lab from next year and hopefully it would be able to accommodate over 1,000 people every year, Hyder said.
“We will train them about the knowledge needed to investigate cybercrime and other software programmes,” he said.
Basic operators would also be trained for assisting the investigators, he added.
The 24/7 operational unit 7 would start working from next year, the officer said.
Citing example, he said South Korea started its cybercrime wing in 1997 with only two experts and now it has nearly 1,000 investigators.
“We are not as much internet dependant as South Korea but we need to develop our own capacity to fight cybercrime,” he added.