As technology adoption and digitisation remains paramount to progress, India needs cyber warriors to check new age digital criminals that pose the biggest threat to India’s progress and security, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said on Friday. “Cybercrime is a threat to the progress and security of our nation. The need of the hour is to create cyber warriors to combat cyber crime,” Sawant said.

The Goa chief minister while speaking at the International Conference on Information Security, Privacy and Digital Forensics (ICISPD 2022) at BITS Pilani campus in Vasco city said there was an immediate need to create cyber warriors to combat the cyber menace.

The chief minister said the importance of comprehensively addressing social media privacy issues cannot be underestimated and the challenge calls for skilled experts. The Goa CM also stressed on the need for awareness, knowledge and skills about the emerging trends in cybercrimes and training in latest technologies of cyber security and computer forensics.

“As per data from the National Crime Records Bureau, a total of 52,974 cases of cyber crime were registered, showing an increase of 5.9 per cent in registration since 2020,” Sawant said adding that “the crime rate in this category had increased from 3.7 per cent in 2020 to 3.9 per cent in 2021.”

According to Goa CM, in 2021, 60.8 per cent of cyber crime cases were of fraud, 8.6 per cent of sexual exploitation and 5.4 per cent of extortion. He said that two of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, the computer and the internet have changed the world.

“It is interesting that children born at the start of this millennium can’t even imagine a world without internet connectivity and mobile devices,” he said. The positive side of the internet and related technologies became clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, the chief minister said.