Indians question Aadhaar, but get naked before white man for visa: Union Minister

Jun 27: Alittle-known Indian IT firm offered its hacking services to help clients spy on more than 10,000 email accounts over a period of seven years.

New Delhi-based BellTroX InfoTech Services targeted government officials in Europe, gambling tycoons in the Bahamas, and well-known investors in the United States including private equity giant KKR and short seller Muddy Waters, according to three former employees, outside researchers, and a trail of online evidence.

Aspects of BellTroX's hacking spree aimed at American targets are currently under investigation by U.S. law enforcement, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment.

Reuters does not know the identity of BellTroX's clients. In a telephone interview, the company's owner, Sumit Gupta, declined to disclose who had hired him and denied any wrongdoing.

Muddy Waters founder Carson Block said he was "disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that we were likely targeted for hacking by a client of BellTroX." KKR declined to comment.

Researchers at internet watchdog group Citizen Lab, who spent more than two years mapping out the infrastructure used by the hackers, released a report that BellTroX employees were behind the espionage campaign.

"This is one of the largest spy-for-hire operations ever exposed," said Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton.

Although they receive a fraction of the attention devoted to state-sponsored espionage groups or headline-grabbing heists, "cyber mercenary" services are widely used, he said. "Our investigation found that no sector is immune."

A cache of data reviewed by Reuters provides insight into the operation, detailing tens of thousands of malicious messages designed to trick victims into giving up their passwords that were sent by BellTroX between 2013 and 2020. The data was supplied on condition of anonymity by online service providers used by the hackers after Reuters alerted the firms to unusual patterns of activity on their platforms.

The data is effectively a digital hit list showing who was targeted and when. Reuters validated the data by checking it against emails received by the targets.

On the list: judges in South Africa, politicians in Mexico, lawyers in France and environmental groups in the United States. These dozens of people, among the thousands targeted by BellTroX, did not respond to messages or declined comment.

Reuters was not able to establish how many of the hacking attempts were successful.

BellTroX's Gupta was charged in a 2015 hacking case in which two U.S. private investigators admitted to paying him to hack the accounts of marketing executives. Gupta was declared a fugitive in 2017, although the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on the current status of the case or whether an extradition request had been issued.

Speaking by phone from his home in New Delhi, Gupta denied hacking and said he had never been contacted by law enforcement. He said he had only ever helped private investigators download messages from email inboxes after they provided him with login details.

"I didn't help them access anything, I just helped them with downloading the mails and they provided me all the details," he told Reuters. "I am not aware how they got these details but I was just helping them with the technical support."

Reuters could not determine why the private investigators might need Gupta to download emails. Gupta did not return follow-up messages. Spokesmen for Delhi police and India's foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

HOROSCOPES AND PORNOGRAPHY

Operating from a small room above a shuttered tea stall in a west-Delhi retail complex, BellTroX bombarded its targets with tens of thousands of malicious emails, according to the data reviewed by Reuters. Some messages would imitate colleagues or relatives; others posed as Facebook login requests or graphic notifications to unsubscribe from pornography websites.

Fahmi Quadir's New York-based short selling firm Safkhet Capital was among 17 investment companies targeted by BellTroX between 2017 and 2019. She said she noticed a surge in suspicious emails in early 2018, shortly after she launched her fund.

Initially "it didn't seem necessarily malicious," Quadir said. "It was just horoscopes; then it escalated to pornography."

Eventually the hackers upped their game, sending her credible-sounding messages that looked like they came from her coworkers, other short sellers or members of her family. "They were even trying to emulate my sister," Quadir said, adding that she believes the attacks were unsuccessful.

U.S. advocacy groups were also repeatedly targeted. Among them were digital rights organizations Free Press and Fight for the Future, both of whom have lobbied for net neutrality. The groups said a small number of employee accounts were compromised, but the wider organizations' networks were untouched. The spying on those groups was detailed in a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2017, but has not been publicly tied to BellTroX until now.

Timothy Karr, a director at Free Press, said his organization "sees an uptick in breach attempts whenever we're engaged in heated and high-profile public policy debates." Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, said: "When corporations and politicians can hire digital mercenaries to target civil society advocates, it undermines our democratic process."

While Reuters was not able to establish who hired BellTroX to carry out the hacking, two former employees said the company and others like it were usually contracted by private investigators on behalf of business rivals or political opponents.

Bart Santos of San Diego-based Bulldog Investigations was one of a dozen private detectives in the United States and Europe who told Reuters they had received unsolicited advertisements for hacking services out of India - including one from a person who described himself as a former BellTroX employee. The pitch offered to carry out "data penetration" and "email penetration."

Santos said he ignored those overtures, but could understand why some people didn't. "The Indian guys have a reputation for customer service," he said.

The Indian National Congress is considering to move court seeking action against operation lotus,  after an audio clip in which Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan can be heard saying that the Central leadership of Bharatiya Janata Party wanted the Kamal Nath government to fall went viral.

Mr Chouhan is also heard saying in the purported 9.28-minute long audio clip that it was not possible to pull down the Kamal Nath government without the help of Jyotiraditya Scindia and his loyalist, former Congress MLA Tulsi Silawat.

The Congress, which has all along maintained that the BJP had hatched a conspiracy to pull down the 15-month-old Kamal Nath government to “capture” power in MP, threatened legal action.

“I have been maintaining from the very beginning that there was a conspiracy to pull down my duly elected government… The audio has established that the BJP’s Central leadership had conspired to pull down my government even though it enjoyed majority,” former chief minister and Congress veteran Kamal Nath said.

Working president of MP Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) Jitu Patwari said his party may move court against the BJP for having plotted to dislodge an elected government following the expose in the purported audio.

Mr Chouhan was reportedly addressing BJP workers of Sanware Assembly constituency in Indore on Monday when he allegedly said in Hindi, “The Central leadership (of BJP) decided that the (Kamal Nath) government should fall. They (the Kamal Nath government) will ruin and destroy … Tell me, was it possible to dislodge the government without Jyotiraditya Scindia and Tulsi Bhai? There was no other way.”  

The “Tulsi Bhai” referred to in the clip is former health minister who joined the BJP along with Mr Scindia.

“In the coming bypoll if Tulsi Silawat doesn’t become MLA again, will I be able to remain CM, will the BJP government survive?” he allegedly said, exhorting BJP workers to overcome their differences and work for Mr Silawat’s victory in the upcoming by-elections in the Sanwer Assembly seat.

Twenty-two Congress MLAs, loyal to Mr Scindia, had resigned from the Assembly leading to the fall of the Kamal Nath government on March 20, paving the way for Mr Chouhan to return as chief minister for the fourth time.

All the 22 ex-Congress MLAs later joined the BJP with Mr Scindia. Two of them, Mr Silawat and Govind Singh Rajput, have been inducted into the Shivraj Singh Chouhan Cabinet.

The BJP has vehemently denied any role in the collapse of the Kamal Nath government. Neither the saffron party’s Central leadership nor Mr Chouhan have reacted to the audio clip yet

But the party’s state spokesperson Rajneesh Agrawal dismissed the charge that it had a hand in the fall of the Kamal Nath government.

“Infighting in Congress had led to the fall of the Kamal Nath government,” he said.

New Delhi, Feb 23: Hailing the role of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in shaping India a modern nation state, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday hit out at the Narendra Modi-led Central government, saying "nationalism" and the slogan of 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' are being misused to construct a militant and purely emotional idea of India.

Speaking at the launch of a book on Jawaharlal Nehru's works and speeches, Singh said: "I am extremely happy that this book makes an effort to revisit Pandit Nehru. He had led this country in its volatile, formative days when we adopted democratic way of life, accommodating divergent social and political views."

The former Prime Minister said that Nehru, who was very proud of Indian heritage, "assimilated it", and harmonised them into the needs of a "new modern" India.

"A great visionary, Nehruji laid the foundation for shaping India as a modern nation state," he said.

Highlighting the works of the first Prime Minister, Singh said: "If India is recognized in the comity of nations as a vibrant democracy and, if it is considered as one of the important world powers, it was Nehru, who should be recognised as its main architect."

He said Nehru was not only a statesman of high international standing, but a great historian and literary figure too.

"With an inimitable style, and a multi-linguist, Nehru laid the foundation of the universities, academies and cultural institutions of Modern India. But for Nehru's leadership, Independent India would not have become what it is today," he said.

Taking an apparent dig at the BJP government, he said: "But unfortunately, a section of people who either do not have the patience to read history or would like to be deliberately guided by their prejudices, try their best to picture Nehru in a false light.

"But I am sure, history has a capacity to reject fake and false insinuations and put everything in proper perspective," he said.

He said the book "Who is Bharat Mata" is such an attempt to set the narrative in the right direction.

Singh said that selecting appropriate pieces from Nehruji's works, the book justifies its title "Who is Bharat Mata?"

"As this book contains a timely collection of writings by and on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru- the leader, who shaped India and the Icon whose legacy is the subject of intense and often angry reaction today.

The book also comprises reminiscences and assessments of Nehru by some of his contemporaries and near contemporaries-among them, including Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sheikh Abdullah, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Ali Sardar Jafri, Baldev Singh, Martin Luther King Jr, Richard Attenborough, Lee Kuan Yew and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

"It is a book of particular relevance at a time when nationalism and the slogan of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai' are being misused to construct a militant and purely emotional idea of India that excludes millions of residents and citizens," Singh said attacking the BJP government.

The two time Prime Minister further said that in the pages of the carefully complied anthology-which also carries illuminating introductions by the authors Nehru emerges as a "remarkable man of ideas and action", who had an instinctive understanding of India's civilisational spirit and as a visionary with clear commitment to the promotion of scientific temper, who despite the compulsions of politics, remained a true democrat.

"His legacy continues to be of immense significance-perhaps more today than at any other time in our history," he said.

He also warned that "Nehru makes a very significant and time relevant remark on the dangers of leaderships falling into a trap and getting removed far away from the common people whom they are supposed to serve".

"In an atmosphere, when emotions are deliberately get provoked and the gullible are misled by false propaganda, misusing communication technology, this book makes a refreshing break through," Singh added.