The Apogee Interview

‘Need for Security and Awareness in Digital Space’

Allahabad High Court (Lucknow Bench) Advocate Shri Abhishek Srivastava, a computer engineer turned lawyer, throws light on how security and digital awareness are required in digital space with advancements in Artificial Intelligence.

With advancements in Technological domains like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its integration and about 43% Internet users and growing, India is the new playground for the technical and digital players.

The increased internet usage and AI integration are we prepared to tackle unprecedented threats in Cyberspace. Our expert answers questions.

Excerpts from the Interview

What is Artificial Intelligence? Can you simplify it for our readers?

Artificial Intelligence is a field of Computer Science which mimics cognitive functions of human brain and replicates it on a machine i.e. a computational system.

In simplified terms we can see a computer performing tasks with steps which humans are capable of performing when encountered with a task. The Artificial Intelligence is mimicking into machine that set of instructions or steps -an algorithm, which a human brain follows while performing any task.

See Artificial Intelligence is not a new concept earlier machines were used to perform tasks which included computational tasks like a calculator performing calculations. Another example would be integrated development environment (IDE) which provided for automatic code generations while doing software development. Now, the tech advancements are extending it to other sectors of applications like in self-driving motor vehicle and content creations through generative artificial intelligence.

What are some uses of Artificial Intelligence?

Some common applications are in the field of image and video editing tools, content and data processing in generative content field, contract creations and analysis in legal domain, automation of tasks and other computational and predictive tasks, Robotics etc.

I was recently going through an article which talked about an AI system under research which is capable of examining the protein sequences and helping in drug analysis for Cancer Patients.

So the scope of AI application are far-reaching and there are far more applications of it in near future and is limited only to the human imagination.

You talked about generative AI are we capable of handling the ‘deepfakes’ issue?

See the current scenario of digital space is that it is growing exponentially but the current laws are not adapting to its rate of growth. Like the data privacy and protection laws are currently not that stringent to address these deepfake issues but the new laws like the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 cater these issue to greater extent but the security feature is missing in the said Act.

We have recently encountered deepfake videos of various celebrities from various industries like film industry both here in India and in US, even political leaders have been victim of the same. But, the cyber investigating officers have been able to find the mischievous elements and then the law took its proper course.

However, with AI integration it is possible to protect users against these deepfake videos, one solution could be marking such videos with some identifier within the generative tool itself. Also, these identifiers could be used by the social media platforms to check when such videos are uploaded on the internet.

The Government can also set up Cyber Labs to identify such marked videos and stop its circulation on priority. But, with the current laws we can only do damage control if we encounter any such issue.

What is the main reason for cyber crime?

There are various reasons which we see in cyber crime cases. There are certain criminals which do these crimes for financial gains, these crimes increased during Covid-19 where a lot of digital transactions were reported to be fraudulent and these sometimes involved the actors from the banking system itself or someone impersonating these officers.

The other kind included ransomware attacks or other kinds of cyber assaults like domain hi-jacking, denial of services etc. The motive behind these crimes are gaining access to data of the individual or the company etc.

Then there are cyber crimes where the motive is to gain personal information of individuals and misappropriate them to gains in nature of monetary, sometimes non-monetary and sometimes both. These crimes include making fake videos, images, audio etc sometimes these spoil relations, cause damage to the repute of a person etc.

Recently, we encountered that the Hon’ble High Court at Karnataka stopped its video-conferencing facilities when some obscene videos were played during Court proceedings. These kinds of mischievous acts are also part of cyber crime but the real intent of such criminal lies in showcasing their domination over the established system.

What should we do to safe guard our readers interest on the Internet? Could you also share some tips?

Till we are readying our Cyber Security and the laws around it to cater the cyber crime scenarios, awareness regarding the recent cyber crime and following certain practices is must to survive.

There are certain tips which one can follow like creating strong passwords for your social media and using different passwords for different social media accounts. Using two-factor authentications while logging into your email accounts and setting up backup emails for accessing your email accounts.

For UPI and banking transactions we can use One Time Password (OTP) mode for transactions and two factor authentications for logging into the internet banking.

Restrict adding unknown users to your social media is another important tip to safeguard against the cyber crime. It is important to not share your children location and photograph of their surroundings on social media and making your children aware of not to talk to strangers. Also not to share details of your family trips and boarding passes on the social media platforms as they contain your confidential banking data and these can be accessed by doing reverse engineering.