The thing which is being phrased as the biggest scandal of international hacking, possibly involving the associations, big individuals and corporate, organized raids were performed by the investigative agencies in China, India and Romania, depending on the intelligence from the FBI or Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding the planned hacking happening in these three countries and in other countries. The Central Bureau of Investigation raided in four places in India including Pune, Ghaziabad and Mumbai and took the alleged mastermind hacker in custody. According to the sources, his name is Amit Vikram Tiwari (31), the son of a retired army colonel.
Interestingly- the Indian premier League- the controversial cricket league is back again in news with the scandal of hacking. As stated by the highly placed sources, the people attached to the IPL had come up to Tiwari for the purpose of hacking into a few accounts, but there was a dispute between them over the money and after what the work was not completed. Now CBI is inspecting the connection of IPL with this hacking. The officials therefore refused to divulge any details, but suggested that a few people linked to this tournament wanted to conduct high-level hacking.
It was revealed in the primary investigations that the individuals, corporate and even the companies had approached these hackers for the issues related to the marriage disputes or for the commercial purposes that the sources defined as the corporate rivalry.
It is guessed that Amit Vikram Tiwari is the main hacker located in India, but he had been regularly in touch with the master hackers and other people based in abroad and somewhere else. The sources also described that the majority of the people who approached Tiwari for conducting hack into the websites and the email accounts were foreigners. All the potentials- corporate hacking, national security, financial fraud, and also hacking into the secret units and the government departments, were being explored by the CBI along with the FBI.
The officials said that around 900 email accounts were being hacked by the international hackers, including 171 and other 171 accounts of other Indians between the period of February 2011 and February 2013. It had been claimed that several internet websites publicized that the website operators would be able to get the access to the email accounts in exchange for the fee ranging from $250 to $500. The customers, who were desirous to get the unauthorized access, submitted their email accounts to all these sites. After receiving the order along with the email addresses, the site operators got the access to these email accounts and therefore they sent a proof of this access to all the clients.
After receiving the payment from the clients the website operators distributed the password with clients, mentioned Kanchan Prasad, the CBI Spokesperson. CBI had reserved Tiwari and other unknown hackers for the criminal conspiracy, theft of the information and Section 66 of Information Technology Act.
The sources revealed that the payments were received by the hackers through the web-payment portal paypal.com and through western union money transfer.
What had confused the investigators was that the FBI tracking this scandal. This was suspected that some of the accounts were related to the United States government and the big corporate, had also hacked after which the FBI tracked all the hosting sites, which were used for hacking in China, India and Romania. In India, both Tiwari and his fellow hackers used to operate through two primary websites from Pune.
CBI Director Ranjit Sinha mentioned that it was the part of the international law enforcement operation and therefore CBI had listed two FIRs against the suspected operators of the hacking websites. Sinha also mentioned that the operation was the product of an international investigation organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the CBI, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of China and the Department of Combating Organized Crime (DCCO) of Romania, and after that the raids in the three countries were conducted simultaneously.
The FBI officials had regular meetings with the CBI in New Delhi over the past few months and therefore an introductory inquiry was registered in the last month and it was also decided that organized raids would be carried out in all the countries. FBI had introduced some major operation last year against the hackers based globally as part of that the Romanian authorities had taken Guccifer, a hacker into custody on Thursday who were recognized for hacking into the accounts of the powerful leaders. It is claimed that Guccifer had leaked Colin Powell’s personal emails, the paintings of George W Bush and an unreleased script of Downton Abbey online.
CBI sources described that they had no details regarding the arrests, which were made in China and Romania as had been the domain of the authorities in those countries and therefore CBI was only concerned with the investigate in India.
After taking Tiwari into custody from Pune, the CBI officials had brought him to New Delhi for interrogation. Initially, he had given some inputs about the clients as well as about those whose accounts had been hacked. The agency had also recovered the hard drives, laptop and computer used by him to retrieve all data.
Sources also described that Tiwari, who had done his engineering from Pune had once been arrested before in the year 2003 by the Mumbai Police for attempting to defraud a credit card processing company based in Mumbai.
