Kishan is jealous of his colleague Vikrams success in the organisation they work for. He gives vent to his envy by sending unpleasant messages to another colleague, Radha, using Vikrams mobile number. It leads to a major fight between the two. But, Kishans purpose is served.
This isnt a scene from a film but one of the latest entrants in the list of cyber crimes, called Short Messaging Service (SMS) Spoofing.
Using SMS spoofing, cyber crooks can send disturbing, vulgar messages using your cell phone number to another cell phone.
So it has become more dangerous to reveal your cell number to people.
In a recent experiment, the Pune-based Asian School for Cyber Laws (ASCL) successfully delivered spoofed messages to international and national numbers. ASCL, set up in 1999, is a premier institute that promotes awareness, study and advanced research in cyber law, cyber crime investigation and other related areas of information technology.
All we had to do is add the area code to the numbers of the cell phones we wanted to SMS and send a message by using Third Party Tools, said Advocate Debasis Nayak, consultant, ASCL.
These third party tools are usually websites on the Internet which allow people to spoof SMSs.
According to Nayak, message servers are used to spoof these messages.
However, bringing culprits to book will be a difficult task. Law enforcement agencies will have to first find the websites that provide the spoofing facility and zero-in on the particular website that was used in a particular case. he explained.
Then the administrator of the message server may have to be contacted to disclose the details of the person who sent the SMS, added Nayak.
These message servers are mostly located outside India. Hence, even if the spoofing is reported, it will be taxing for law enforcement officials to get details of the culprit from the administrators of these servers, explained Nayak.
Nayak believes that co-operation between website owners and the administrators of the message servers is required to detect the perpetrator in such cases.
A fairly recent arrival in the cyber crime category, SMS spoofing is a big challenge in the field of cyber crime investigation, said Nayak.
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