Cyber forensics firms, such as Volon and AVS Labs, are increasingly being asked to crack cases of cybercrime, even as law enforcers build their own teams of cyber intelligence experts.

Take this recent instance.

A businessman was accused of deceit in a deal, and a court issued a non bailable warrant against him. The businessman claimed innocence, but the police could not determine if he was telling the truth. Volon, a Pune-based cyber intelligence agency, coordinated with the police and undertook a forensic sifting of his business data. It revealed that the deceit was, in fact, a case of corporate espionage. The finding enabled the businessman to prove that he had been framed. A case was filed against the people involved.

“The (data) analysis helped the person provide evidence in court,” said Kapil Gupta, cofounder of Volon.

In another instance, an actor based in Tamil Nadu was blackmailed by someone who recorded intimate video conversations after luring him on a virtual private number. The blackmailer used the VPN link to leave no digital trace. The Chennai police sought the help of AVS Labs, another cyber agency, to find the internet protocol (IP) address of the blackmailer. They then investigated further to eventually nail the culprit.

“We did the technical analysis to find the IP address,” said Prasanna J, the CEO of AVS Labs. “We can’t go into operational details (of the case).”

Cybercrime cases registered with the police doubled to 21,796 in 2017, data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in October showed.

More than half of these related to fraud, followed by complaints of sexual exploitation using digital devices.

Karnataka, which set up the country’s first cybercrime station in Bengaluru, registered the highest number of cybercrime cases, followed by Assam, Telangana, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.

Separately, there has also been a rapid rise in cybersecurity incidents.

India reported slightly more than 313,000 cybersecurity incidents in the ten months to October, the government informed Parliament on Thursday. This is a jump of more than 55% from the 208,456 such incidents reported in 2018, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Sanjay Dhotre said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, citing data from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the nodal agency to deal with all cyber security threats in the country.

The number of cyber security incidents that includes denial of service attacks has also increased disproportionately, according to annual reports from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. In 2016-17, while the reported incidents stood at 35,418, in 2017-18 there were 69,539 incidents, rising to 274,465 in 2018-19.

“Almost 100% of cases in the coming years will have a digital footprint. This is a continuously evolving and developing field,” said Naunihal Singh, Inspector General of Police, Jalandhar. “Nobody (including police officers) will ever have complete domain knowledge. Where a domain expert can formally be made a part of the investigations, this needs to be structured and codified. The grey area has to be defined,” he added.

Law enforcement agencies across India are engaging specialists to crack cases.