Cybercrime
The Internet has been in Pakistan since the early 1990s, and in 2000 there were 133,900 users, or 0.1 percent of the population. The latest figures, for 2011, indicate that there are 31 million users or 17.6 percent of the population – and rising fast.
As of February 2012, there were 25 large registered Internet Service Providers, and national coverage of Internet connectivity is almost universal except for the most remote or thinly populated areas. The Internet is fuelling a retail boom in online shopping, distance learning is finally taking off and there is a more mature public perception of the Internet as an entity that is less about sleaze and more about learning, social access – and crime.
Pakistan runs the gamut of cybercrime, and the list is long and growing: credit card frauds and money laundering, the sale of fake and counterfeit goods, fiddling money out of banks, online gambling and a range of online intellectual property rights abuses and crimes. Legislation and our law enforcement agencies, having at first struggled to keep pace, are now gearing up for a fight against criminality that will be like no other ever waged here.
Even the agencies set up to combat cybercrime are not immune from criminal acts themselves; the National Response Centre for Cybercrimes’ website was hacked and defaced in August 2010. Now we hear that the Islamabad police have constituted a cybercrime unit. This will deal with all cyber and electronic crimes within its purview and is symbolic of the awareness of cybercrime nationally; criminal internet activity is also on the rise globally. Connected we may be, but also criminally so no less than other states. Let the battle commence.
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