The spy in cyberspace
the unprecedented spurt in cyber crime and prolific misuse of technology alarms her. “You can’t imagine the level of perversion in the misuse of social media,” says Dhanya. But she also admits that it was not entirely unexpected. The problem has reached its current dimensions because we refused to recognise its magnitude and match it with aggressive awareness campaigns, she notes.
At the turn of the millennium when the Internet was beginning to rule our lives, Dhanya, a Thrissur-based computer science graduate, was pushed to attend a workshop on cyber crime by her grandfather P.B. Menon, a well-known senior advocate of the Supreme Court. “The entire programme was like watching a James Bond movie,” recalls Dhanya. The then little-known subject appealed to her and she completed a certified post- graduate diploma course in Cyber Law and Intellectual Property Rights in Cyber Space and also became a faculty at the Asian School of Cyber Law, Pune.
In 2005, she began training programmes for corporates, police and other State and Central government departments, but she was also asked to investigate various cases. “On an average I would get five to eight complaints a day. Usually people did not know how and where to register a complaint pertaining to internet fraudsters or present evidence in court,” says Dhanya.
The case that upset her the most was the 2006 one in Kerala when three schoolgirls committed suicide in the classroom because boys from another government school were blackmailing them with photos taken on mobile phones. Though solving the case made her the first woman cybercrime investigator, she was troubled by the increasing number of cases related to obscenity, misuse of telephone technology, pornography and visual morphing from porn sites to create fake profiles, unauthorised disclosure of internal and confidential information, and theft or trade of intellectual property.
“My job became glamorous overnight, as people thought I was a powerful blend of Sherlock Holmes and Perry Mason in a man’s world. Only I could not explain to my family what exactly I was doing. They saw me jet- setting around the world for conferences and always working on half-a-