By Zafar Abbas
New Delhi, Jul 25 (IANS): Since employees in many sectors of the economy are forced to work from home amid the coronavirus pandemic, unscrupulous hackers are availing of the window of opportunity to dupe more and more people who spend more time online.
From impersonating an identity on the social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram to luring people for government jobs; from emotional blackmail to pretending to be bank officials, they are trying every trick in their bags to trap people.
Delhi Police says 'caution' is the key word to remember while dealing with matters online.
Delhi resident Jamshed Qamar Siddiqui put some of his old household furniture for sale on OLX on Thursday. He received a message within minutes from a prospective buyer.
After showing interest in the deal the buyer was quick to ask Jamshed to scan a QR code he had sent on the WhattsApp. However, the overenthusiasm of the 'buyer' made the seller suspect his intentions. When he did not scan the code, the buyer became restless and deleted the conversation.
"I got suspicious as he constantly mentioned about Paytm balance and almost forced me to scan the QR code. Fortunately, I did not fall in the trap but online frauds recently duped one of my friends of Rs 90,000," Jamshed said.
On Friday, Delhi police blocked a fake website that lured people in the name of Pradhan Mantri Berozgar Bhatta Yojana 2020. The Delhi police noticed that a URL link of the fake website was pushed through WhatsApp messages in different groups to target gullible people. The website was promptly blocked.
These are not isolated incidents. In the recent past too, Delhi Police took action against many websites which diverted Internet traffic to their web pages to cheat people in the process.
"People are advised to rely on genuine government websites having '.gov.in' extension. Citizens should also verify the information from multiple sources (genuine sites, PIB bulletin, verified social media accounts of government departments etc) before making financial transaction," advised a senior police officer.
In another interesting case of data theft, an ex-employee of a private firm was arrested for hacking into the system of his former employer and meddling with the data of some Covid and other hospitals. Police found an interesting reason for the cyberattack during investigation.
"As he had complete knowledge of the structure and loopholes of the website, he decided to cause a financial loss to the company so that it re-engaged him as senior software solution provider. He confessed that he had launched four cyberattacks and deleted 18,000 data files regarding patients, billing information of around 3 lakh patients and made false entries of around 22,000 patients," DCP (North-West) Vijayanta Arya said.
"The irony is that people don't divulge details to strangers in the real world but in the virtual world they trust easily and part with personal details that are later misused by cyber criminals. The key word is 'caution'. One has to be cautious while interacting on the social media," pointed out Anyesh Roy, DCP, Cybercrime.