Indian Hackers Work illegally For Private Investigators Worldwide

(CTN News) – Hacking gangs in India are at the centre of a global hacking scandal after discovering that Indian Hackers had illegally gained thousands of dollars by breaking into the emails of hundreds of world leaders and other prominent individuals. This was done at the request of international private investigators.

To enter the criminal hacking sector, The Sunday Times Insight Team and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism deployed undercover reporters to India early this year while pretending as former MI6 officers turned corporate investigators looking to employ some of India’s finest computer hackers.

In Mayfair, London, the undercover reporters established a fictitious business investigative firm named Beaufort Intelligence.

Private investigators pay Indian hackers thousands of dollars illegally

They then got in touch with some of India’s top purported hackers, claiming they were looking for confidential information about their customers’ targets.

After receiving many responses, they travelled to India to interview and covertly film these Indian hackers to learn more about their activities.

In their hotel room in Delhi, the undercover journalists talked with Utkarsh Bhargava in Bengaluru through Zoom.

He said that the Indian government hired him to hack. He said that the governments of Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Cambodia, and Canada had hired him to hack into the computer systems of several ministries. He told the spies, “Our duty was to obtain and send the data.

The Sunday Times said that Indian hackers “took possession of computers belonging to Pakistani leaders, generals, and diplomats and eavesdropped on their private conversations allegedly at the direction of the Indian secret services.”

According to the inquiry, Indian hackers often befriended their victims on social media, offered them something interesting to click on, and when they did, they downloaded malware onto their computers, giving the hacker access to their email inboxes.

The Indian hackers who talked to the Sunday Times claimed they had never been apprehended and were paid hundreds of dollars for each task. Most of them started out as cybersecurity specialists.

Bhargava is said to have hacked Egyptair’s passenger list. He said no one sought to bring charges against hackers in India since the authorities “did not comprehend these things.”

He claimed to have also extracted WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram communications from targets using Pegasus software, which can be downloaded and installed on mobile devices.

The undercover reporters also met Ram Chhillar, a former Indian Army officer and the founder of the cyber intelligence firm Phronesis, who claimed to be able to mine the dark web for private information about individuals that had been acquired in earlier cyberattacks or corporate data breaches.

The crew also discovered a gang of Indian hackers working out of a Gurugram office called WhiteInt, controlled by 31-year-old hacker Aditya Jain, whose day job is working for Deloitte.

According to Jain, quoted by The Sunday Times, he could access anyone’s email account within 30 days.

He stated that Appin, a now-defunct company in Delhi, had “trained” him as a hacker to help protect businesses from cyberattacks, but like other companies in his area, it eventually transitioned into the more profitable side business of hacking for private investigators.

The investigative team obtained the target database that Jain kept. Ashok Hinduja, one of the Hinduja brothers, Mark Fullbrook, former UK chancellor Philip Hammond, former Pakistani minister of science and technology Fawad Chaudhry, former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, critics of Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup and critics of Qatar in general.

BBC political editor Chris Mason, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis, former UEAFA President Michel Platini, one of the Hinduja brothers, and others are among the targets.

Indian hackers do 90% of this illegal work for private investigators

At the Leela Palace in Delhi, the journalists encountered Tej Singh Rathore, 28, a graduate of the Rajasthan Technical University in Kota.

He informed them that he had gotten credentials via phishing and said that “the British and the rest of the globe are utilizing Indian hackers.”

According to him, “90% of private investigators utilize Indian hackers to do this work.”

While working for a firm in Amritsar, he claimed to have realized that hacking, or “attack work,” was more profitable than cybersecurity, or “defensive work.”

He afterwards became self-employed and has since taken on jobs ranging from hacking an email account of a dead man to breaking into someone’s Facebook account at the request of their spouse. In the UK as well as India, hacking is forbidden.

India was a very alluring prospect for the investigators. It wasn’t only that India’s enforcement of laws against computer usage was lax;

According to the Sunday Times report, the conduct of crimes in a distant nation with a foreign legal system considerably reduced the likelihood that the investigators would be apprehended or punished.

Related CTN News:

China doubles down on zero-COVID Policy after Reopening Rumours Global Markets