The Union Government is planning to amend the IT Act to give an official stamping to the evidence collected via the Cyber Forensic Tools developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) here.

The first dedicated Resource Centre for Cyber Forencis (RCCF) was officially opened by Union Ministeer for IT and Telecommunication, A Raja at a function a couple of days ago.

C-DAC, Thiruvananthapuram, (formerly ER and DC) has made its presence in the world of cyber forensic tools research and development. The institution, which has developed a number of cyber forensic tools such as True Back, Cyber Check, Email Tracer, Cyber Investigator, Hasher and PDA Analyzer has proved the robustness of its tools used for probing cyber crimes. C-DAC, which currently acts as an expert body on cyber forensics co-ordinates with major investigating agencies in the country. The centre drew international attention when the hard disk of Glassgow terror suspect Kafeel Ahmed was brought here decoding.

Union Minister Raja said government had taken steps to amend the IT Act so that information collected using Cyber Forensic Tools developed by C-DAC would be considered as solid evidence in any court of law in the country. As of now, courts do not accept such information as evidence. The amendment would be brought in the next Parliament session.

According to sources in C-DAC, the institution that give lessons on cyber crimes investigation to law enforcement agencies, has plans for commercial launch of the tools in international market. "In India, we have been using cyber forensic tools developed by international agencies. However, the investigating were finding it difficult to depend fully on such tools available in the international market, especially when it comes to compatibility with the Indian law. With the C-DAC tool, such hurdles will be over," they said.

The cybercheck is a Windows-based application, which allows law enforcement agencies to analyse hard disk content, including deleted files. TrueBack is a cyber forensic software tool for disk imaging, Hasher is a tool that enables the user to verify the integrity of any file. Hashing is an extremely good way to verify the integrity of a sequence of data bits. Emailtracer, incorporates graphical features to help investigators easily track sender's identity in cases of anonymous and threatening emails. It can also be used to retrieve information from mailbox files with extensions.