PM calls for steps to reduce cybercrime

THE RECENT case of the outsourcer who sold British people’s data to hacks at the Sun has so embarrassed the Indian government, that it has been moved to change its wide open protection laws.

According to CIO-Asia, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a special meeting of software company outsourcers that “stringent punishment” would follow any breach of secrecy, illegal transfers of commercial information and other cyber crimes.

Stung by a recent scandal that rocked India’s booming business processing industry, the government on Tuesday announced that it will tighten laws to prevent cyber crime and ensure data secrecy, an official said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a special meeting of software company representatives Tuesday that stringent punishment would follow any breach of secrecy, illegal transfers of commercial information and other cyber crimes.

Existing laws would be tightened to ensure that any criminal activity in the outsourcing business was prosecuted, said Sanjaya Baru, the prime minister’s spokesman.

The Indian government’s tough message to software company heads was the fallout of last week’s revelation by a British newspaper that an Indian call center employee had allegedly sold personal data on 1,000 British customers to an undercover reporter.

The employee, Karan Bahree, was fired from his job at Web designer Infinity eSearch after The Sun newspaper alleged that he supplied details on the Britons’ bank accounts, credit cards, passports and drivers’ licenses, including numbers and pass codes, addresses and phone numbers.
The tabloid said it paid Bahree 3 pounds (USD 5.40) each for the data.

Although Bahree denied any wrongdoing, the sting operation revealed the vulnerability of hundreds of Western firms that rely on business outsourcing firms in countries such as India, where skilled professionals can provide backoffice support for a fraction of what it would cost in a developed country.

Indian software companies have established themselves as global leaders in providing telemarketing services, call center operations, payroll accounting and credit card processing.

Kiran Karnik, head of the software industry trade group, said Tuesday that the Indian data processing industry was committed to ensuring “ensuring the highest standards of data privacy.”

However, at the meeting with Singh, Karnik also expressed concern that the recent scandal “may well have been a sting operation directed to give Indian industry a bad name against the background of growing competitiveness,” Baru said.

The National Association of Software and Service Companies or NASSCOM, said was building a central database of all outsourcing industry employees to prevent criminals from getting jobs in the sector and threatening the data security of global companies.

The UK-based tabloid, The Sun, had reported last week that its undercover journalist had obtained account numbers, bank card details, secret passwords, and other personal details of 1,000 British Bank customers by allegedly paying USD 5,000 to Karan Bahree, an employee of a Delhi-based IT company called Infinity e-Search.

Following this, Bahree had claimed that he had acted on behest of another person to merely deliver a “CD presentation” without knowing that he was passing on classified information. Bahree was later fired by Infinity e-Search.