Bengaluru: The state government of Karnataka would take all the measures to upgrade the Cyber Forensics Section to bring it on par with international standards. This was informed by Karnataka’s Home Minister K J George on Wednesday assuring that the government will allocate the necessary funds and provide the required manpower also.

Addressing the gathering after inaugurating the Cyber Forensics Section at the Directorate of Forensic Sciences Laboratories at Madiwala in Bangalore, Home Minister KJ George, said that efforts would be made to provide the adequate staff at the Cyber Forensics Section. “I am confident that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will allocate more funds in the state budget that will be presented on March 13. All the measures will be taken to extend the memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the CDAC, Thiruvananthapuram,’’ the minister said.

B Dayananda, director, Directorate of Forensic Science Laboratories, said, “It is a result of efforts that are being made for the last three years to establish this Cyber Forensics Section.’’ Dayananda said.

Till now, though the State police had the cyber laboratory to probe digital evidence, they had to wait for the report from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Hyderabad, for admissibility under the Evidence Act in the court of law.

The centre has been developed by the State police on a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, at a cost of Rs 1.30 crore.

“These days, every crime involves electronic gadgets, especially mobile phones and laptops. The tools and softwares at the centre will be used for imaging the suspected media at the crime scene.

There are high-capacity data-transfer tools, softwares, especially designed for analysis of Chinese-make phones,  tools for recovering passwords using brute force, dictionary attacks, tools for hashing the suspected drive and also to clone the drive. Deleted files, network analysis can be carried out with the softwares set up at the centre,” an official said.

Karnataka became the first state in the country to set up a Cyber Crime Investigation Cell in 1999 to tackle cyber attacks. Since then, the focus has been to equip the state’s police with all the necessary resources to tackle the rising cyber crimes.