[Super Student ] 22 year old Sourav dreams of making it high in the field of Cyber Security.

The decision to run a startup out from a college is not an easy task. A student entrepreneur has to juggle between his studies and the task to keep the venture running. Even then we have seen many of such student entrepreneurs turning their dreams into reality. Our super student today is one such person who is making his mark in the field of cyber security.

Sourav Karmakar is a familiar name in my network of entrepreneurs, I have been hearing about him ever since he started experimenting with his ethical hacking skills three years ago. When I came to know about the success of his startup, it dawned on me that he is a perfect candidate for Super Student. As he started narrating his journey I prepared myself to witness an intriguing story.

Getting inspired from Hollywood flicks to catching culprits

Sourav is a final-year B. Tech (computer science) student from B.P. Poddar Institute of Management and Technology, Kolkata. His passion for computers and technology started at an early stage. He profoundly mentions “back then movies like 'Die-hard' and 'The core' mesmerized me and I wondered about the level of technology used in them. I always wanted to use and create such. ” In the years to come he would work explicitly on his dream to transform them into a reality. In 2011, merely into the college he tried cracking into Kolkata traffic police’s website and found loopholes which gave him access to their database. But he restrained himself from committed any unauthorized act and also alerted the concerned authorities about the same. Based upon this incident he was contacted to solve number of cases for Kolkata Police. Sourav was primarily responsible to solve the Park Street rape case. Helping the police to catch the culprit as he hacked into his Google account and tracked down his location.

An entrepreneur in the making

As Sourav helped police and CID solving cases on the IT front, he got an an interesting offer by head of NASSCOM (eastern region) to start a venture which could provide training to the legal authorities on the Information Technology and Cyber crime. Thus in May 2012, SAS Securities came into existence while Sourav was still studying in college.

SAS Securities is an Ethical Hacking & IT services company which offers services to support law enforcement organizations and corporate industries. It also certifies students in different field of information security and Cyber Forensics skills, provide training in Ethical Hacking , Penetration Testing ,Forensics among others. Till date the startup has provide cyber training to the employees of CBI and TCS to name a few. Sourav also mentions that around 5000 students have been benefited from 39+ workshops.

His efforts and help was rightly acknowledged by Ministry of West Bengal and he was granted the privilege of attending only the exams and skipping the regular college classes.

Life as Student Entrepreneur

Sourav is assisted by his co-founder Ankur Biswas and a nine-member team at SAS Securities which includes four in the technical leads and five on management side. In addition to the workshops the startup also provides security assistance to companies who have extensive web presence.

In the conversation he also mentions the methodology to select companies “the process is quite peculiar, we try to concentrate on those companies who tend to value their internet presence.” He also mentions that they are going to concentrate on getting more projects in the corporate sector for online security. In the present financial year SAS Securities has earned around 10 lakhs (till July), Sourav profoundly mentions that his venture will also start projects on Secure Cloud Architecture and Advanced Reversed Engineering in the near future.

Apart from being a dependable person in the (cyber crime cases) for the detective department of Kolkata Police, Sourav is being called upon for delivering guest lectures in eminent universities. Recently he was invited to ISM Dhanbad to deliver a talk on Web Application security and cloud.

Sourav will also be attending the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards this month. We wish him all the very best for the event.

You can get in touch with Sourav on Facebook

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