Byte by Byte: Hack - talk to men in Khaki

Publication : Times of India (Bangalore)
Page No. : 3
Circulation : 2,03,083
Date : 27.08.2000

For once, the roles were reversed for the men in Khaki. So were some IT head-honchos. They were grasping the nuance of hacking, byte by byte. Among the listeners were senior policemen and bigwigs from India's Silicon Valley and the man on the podium was white hat ethical hacker Tom Cervenka, a popularly known as Blue Adept.

Tom, who was in town to conduct a workshop on 'Hacking portals and websites - prevention and damages - control' organized by Internet Component management Group (iCMG) enlightened his spellbound audience on the modus operandi of ethical hackers with great expertise.

Though the government has given its nod to the IT bill in parliament the legal aspect of hacking and related issues are yet to be addressed. Tom's mission was to spread the need for ethical hackers. B V Naidu, Director, Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) was impressed with the master hacker. " The idea to meet Tom was to create an awareness among our officers on the happenings on Internet. Since, everyone is becoming Net-savvy it's important for us to know the good and bad things on the web. It was definitely a session with a difference".

According to Dr. E V Ramana Reddy, Director Information Technology, Karnataka, the hack-talk did pep up most of his fellow colleagues. "We got introduced to ethical hacking. We were keen to know more about Net Security".

All participants saw the imperative need to be equipped for future Net calamities. Though the discussion mostly revolved around ethical hacking. Some listeners were hell-bent on finding out the availability of a specific mechanism to track illegal actively on the Net.

"The Internet has no jurisdiction area or space. But we the policemen have all the three. Since we were interested in policing the cyberspace. We wanted Tom to share the know-how on a software for the cybercop", said V V Bhaskar, DGP, COD and Economic Offences. "Lawlessness on the Net can cause major problems in the future. To arrest this Bangalore police are interest in a monitoring system".

S K Balaraman, DIG, State Crime Records Bureau, felt the need to legalize ethical hacking to put an end to increasing cyber offences. "Tom briefed us all about the hacking business. With most of our departments going online, we were quite fascinated with his demonstrations".