Delving deeper into this news, at least 10,000 email accounts have become victims of this spying job that lasted for almost seven years. Moreover, the victims aren’t just a bunch of nobodies since they happen even to include big investors, gambling tycoons, and politicians.
BellTroX InfoTech Services has been determined as the name of the firm and is owned by Sumit Gupta. A little more about the owner: Gupta has been the target of a 2015 hacking case where he was proven to be hacking marketing executives’ accounts for US private investigators. So, it can be seen that Mr. Gupta has been a controversial figure for quite a while now.
Sumit Gupta, owner, and director of cybersecurity firm BellTroX InfoTech Services, (Courtesy: REUTERS/Alasdair Pal)
As of now, US law enforcement is looking at this matter, which involves spying on a high number of Americans. On the other hand, the US Department of Justice preferred staying silent in this case. Both the researchers at Citizen Lab and the founder of Carson Block (Muddy Waters) were expecting BellTroX to be behind this major hacking job.
What is still unknown is the identity of individuals who opted for their services; however, ex-workers gave some inside info that the clients included private investigators who wanted to plot against rival businesses or politicians.
Moreover, when Gupta got asked about being involved in any hacking jobs, he replied in negative and claimed to have never come in contact with law enforcement. What he did admit to was downloading messages from email inboxes for private investigators through login details provided by them, claiming that he didn’t hack anything.
The approach undertaken by the company was of sending malicious messages that persuade the reader to give out their password. Apart from that, our official news source was able to get its hands on the company’s data, which ascertained the targets of this espionage. With that being said, there isn’t much info on the ratio of successful to unsuccessful hacking attempts that took place.
Getting into the specifics of the attempts, the malicious messages were in the form of emails by people known by the receiver and Facebook login requests. In contrast, others were related to horoscopes and adult websites subscriptions. According to one of the targets, the emails didn’t seem that convincing at first, but they started to look a lot more personal and real with time. An email even tried to imitate a close family member of the target, which explains why so many people fell into the hackers’ trap.
Conclusion
Although it’s no surprise that a small Indian tech company has been involved in a hacking job, what could be a bit worrying is that so many renowned personalities were affected by it. Also, because of this finding, the law enforcement agencies would be keeping an eye on other companies of similar scope.