NEW DELHI: In the first operation of its kind, the special cell of Delhi Police has busted an ISI-sponsored hacker group that had been defacing Indian government web sites and promoting hatred on social networking sites. Two youths have been arrested so far.
Both were apparently part of an “anti-national hacking group” called Team Hackers Third Eye, based in Lahore and Dubai. It is suspected to have hacked thousands of Indian websites since 2016, a report in The Times of India said today quoting the Police. The group has allegedly broken into over 500 Indian websites, including that of J&K Bank early this year,
Police have filed a case of sedition under Section124A of the Indian Penal Code and Section 66 of the IT Act as well as criminal conspiracy under IPC Section 120 B.
Of the arrested pair, Shahid Malla is a BTech student and Aadil Hussain a BCA student. They were linked with operatives of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, say the Police, who have acted on a tip-off.
The Pakistanis suspected to be in contact with the duo are identified as Faisal Afzal and Amir Muzaffar, who belong to the pro-Pak hacking group called Pak Cyber Attacker, or PCA.
Delhi Police has formed a special team to gather information and track the suspects. When the investigators noticed that youths in Kashmir were still accessing Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp despite a local ban on these social media platforms, they learnt that the users were taking recourse to proxy servers and Virtual Private Networks (VPN).
Two Facebook accounts, Leetslab and /haxer1, were discovered to be encouraging and educating internet users of J&K to bypass the ban. “This was Malla’s account. He was advocating the use of a VPN service called ‘surfeasy’,” according to the police.