Indian ‘Hack-for-Hire’ Firms Infiltrate VIPs Phones, Mail for Fee: Report

Illegal hacking operatives, dubbed “hack-for-hire” firms, are working throughout India and infiltrate emails and telephones of VIPs and states for a payment paid by personal investigators around the globe, an undercover investigation has claimed on Sunday.

‘The Sunday Times’ and Bureau of Investigative Journalism carried out a sting operation to reveal a number of Indian hackers providing their providers to hack into personal e mail accounts and messages of victims on behalf of investigators working for autocratic states, British legal professionals and their rich purchasers.

According to the investigation based mostly on leaked paperwork and undercover work in India earlier this yr, journalists posing as former MI6 brokers turned personal investigators declare that one gang “seized control of computers” owned by Pakistan’s politicians, generals and diplomats and eavesdropped on their personal conversations “apparently at the behest of the Indian secret services”.

The hacking gang, which operates underneath the title WhiteInt, is run from a fourth-floor condo in a suburb of the tech metropolis Gurugram in Haryana. Its mastermind is a 31-year-old man — an occasional TV cybersecurity pundit who additionally holds down a day job on the Indian workplace of a British accountancy agency, in keeping with the ‘Sunday Times’ report.

For seven years, he has run a community of laptop hackers who’ve been employed by British personal detectives to steal the e-mail inboxes of their targets utilizing ‘phishing’ methods, it claims.

Malicious software program which takes management of laptop cameras and microphones, and permits hackers to view and take heed to their victims are a few of the strategies utilized in such hack-for-hire operations, which earns hackers anyplace between $3,000 (roughly Rs. 2,46,650) and $20,000 (roughly Rs. 16,44,320).

“I offer access to closed source information of email and computers of the PoI (person of interest) anywhere across the globe… an average timeline is around 20 to 30 days,” he was quoted as telling the undercover journalists.

When approached last month by the team, he claimed he did not know some of the people named on his database and denied hacking the others listed: “I can say categorically that I have not hacked, launched or attempted to hack any of these people.” Another operative contacted by the team was a 28-year-old computer specialist, who boasted of hacking more than 500 email accounts, mostly on behalf of his corporate intelligence clients.

“The British and the whole world… are using Indian hackers,” he is quoted as saying in Delhi.

When approached for comment last month, he claimed he had only “hacked 100 times” and that he was “blowing my own trumpet”.

He alleged that UK companies had been employing Indian hackers for more than a decade.

One of them was allegedly set up in Delhi more than a dozen years ago supposedly to train a new generation of “ethical” hackers who could help safeguard individuals and businesses from cyberattacks.

However, the firm, now defunct, is alleged to have secretly established a lucrative sideline taking cash from clients around the world to hack individuals. These clients are said to have included corporate intelligence companies based in Britain, the Sunday Times reported.

The undercover investigation concludes that the use of the “Indian underworld to break into email accounts and smartphones has become a practice that has been proliferating for years”.

Investigators from the UK have been able to commission “hack-for-hire” firms with little fear that they will be prosecuted for breaking the country’s computer misuse laws.

Several of the targets on the leaked database accessed by them include British lawyers and wealthy people involved in cases in London’s High Court, reportedly including a member of the UK’s richest Indian-origin Hinduja family, the Sunday Times report said.