The two day counter-terror meet of BRICS nations will focus on China’s all weather ally Pakistan and seek international cooperation to fight cross border terrorism. India's National Investigation Agency (NIA) will be holding the discussion with their counterparts from Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa on April 13-14 in New Delhi, said Officials.

The federal probe agency during its investigation of terrorist attacks have established links of Pakistan based terror outfits, responsible for the attacks in India, particularly Jammu and Kashmir. The agency has named several UN designated militants including JeM’s Maulana Masood Azhar and LeT chief Hafiz Saeed. The two were designated under amended UAPA by the union home ministry in 2019.

“The discussions will be on misuse of the internet by militant’s outfits and role of digital forensics for anti-terror investigations,” said a home ministry official adding that use of various Internet-based social media platforms by Islamic State to propagate its ideology will also be taken up.

Indian agencies including NIA have arrested more than 180 members and sympathisers of terrorist organisation Islamic State (IS) from various states. The outfit was notified as a terrorist organisation and included in the first schedule of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, by the central government.

India is also likely to raise the issue of dark web, cyber threats, Emotet Botnet infrastructure and Dark Market, the world's largest illegal marketplace on the Dark Web trading in all kinds of explosives, drugs, counterfeit money and illegal arms. It may be recalled that a study last year on the Mumbai power outage, has indicated that the attacks may have originated from China.

According to Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) estimates, the majority of such attacks appear to originate from China, Russia, and Brazil among others. As many as 17560, 24768 and 26121 Indian websites were hacked during the year 2018, 2019 and 2020 respectively, according to CERT-In.