That man next to you at the cyber café looks like any other busy executive punching away hard at his keyboard, engrossed in his world. But chances are that he may be a hacker.

“The people who commit cyber crimes are mostly those who have white collar jobs, unlike the usual criminals we expect. They can even be high school kids. The territory that a cyber crime can stretch across is immense. It can go over continents. An account can be accessed anywhere so tracing the wrongdoer can be a long drawn process,” says Abhinav Bhatt, business development executive, Asian School of Cyber Laws.

In Bangalore, a first of its kind cyber crime police station has been established on September 15 and Pune’s Asian School of Cyber Laws (ASCL) has an all-important role to play in the establishment and training of the personnel manning the station.

This police station caters to and specializes exclusively in the investigation of cyber crimes. “Experts from ASCL were invited by the Inspector General of Police (economic offences) Om Prakash to conduct the workshops for the benefit of Karnataka State Police in COD (Corps of Detectives) HQs, Bangalore. Starting with a day long workshop on August 13 this year, we held a five-day workshop from September 3-7,” says Bhatt.

The police were given hands on training on computers, web development, site uploading as well as hacking against web sites and systems.

Hacking time theft (stealing someone else’s internet time) and pornography are the main areas of cyber crime.

The initial awareness lecture was attended by the top brass of the Karnataka police, headed by the IG Om Prakash. The second workshop was for the 12 elite group of senior level police personnel who are to man the cyber crime police station.

In the second workshop, the officers who are now actually involved in the investigations of cyber crimes were taken through an intensive course which included internet technologies like designing websites, uploading web pages, hacking and encryption technology.

The sessions were designed in a way so as to start with basic knowledge of computer hardware. There was in depth hands-on training provided to the police personnel on topics like hacking and tracing intrusion during and after attacks, using tools for capturing other computers or crashing servers, tracing electronic communication. They also informed the participants about high end entrancing the owners of websites, data attacks like viruses, logic bombs, worms clarifying technical concepts, cyber crime scene re-construction, cyber forensics, data recovery from hacked and damaged disks. Use of firewalls and other network security devices was also part of the course content.

“The idea was to introduce to the police personnel the tools that a hacker would be most likely to use. Tracking such cases would be easy once they knew what tools were used,” says Bhatt. What’s more is that, “They are currently working on some cases relating to cyber crimes, but investigations are on so it’s too early to comment.”

Cyber crimes are punishable under the Information Technology Act 2000 with 10 years in prison and up to a crore in fine for each offence.