Delhi cops bust ISI-sponsored hacker group

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 government websites and promoting hatred on social networking sites. Two Kashmiri youths have been arrested and raids are on to apprehend other suspects.

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 in a Punjab-based university. The two were apparently part of an "anti-national hacking group" called Team Hackers Third Eye and had allegedly broken into over 500 Indian websites, including that of J&K Bank in January this year, police said. They are being grilled on the identity of their associates in Pakistan and India.


Police also claimed they were linked with operatives of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. An officer identified the Pakistanis suspected to be in contact with Malla and Hussain as Faisal Afzal and Amir Muzaffar, who belong to the pro-Pak hacking group called Pak Cyber Attacker, or PCA. The group, based in Lahore and Dubai, is suspected to have hacked thousands of Indian websites since 2016.

After receiving a tip-off about the suspects from a military intelligence unit, Delhi Police formed a special team led by additional DCP KPS Malhotra to gather information and track the suspects. When the investigators noticed that youths in Kashmir were still accessing Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp despite the ban on them, they learnt that the users were being educated on how to bypass the internet service providers' blocks using proxy servers and Virtual Private Networks.

An intelligence source said two Facebook accounts, Leetslab and /haxer1, were discovered to be encouraging 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'," disclosed a source.