At the direction of Indian secret services, a computer hacking group operating out of India targeted Pakistani politicians, military leaders, and diplomats to eavesdrop on their private talks, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism of the Sunday Times reported.
According to information obtained from leaked papers and undercover reporting conducted in India by the reporters of the aforementioned organizations, private British investigators were spying on dozens of prominent people at the direction of “autocratic” leaders using an Indian hacker gang.
on Jan 10 this year, the gang was tasked with breaking into the email account of Fawad Chaudhry, then information minister during Imran Khan’s government. It took a screenshot of Fawad Chaudhry’s inbox, which has been seen by the Sunday Times and the Bureau.
The hacking team used malware to take over his computers and targeted the country’s senior generals as well as its embassies in Beijing, Shanghai and Kathmandu in a similar way. The most famous Pakistan-related target was Pervez Musharraf, the former president of the country.
The hacking gang, which operated under the name WhiteInt, was being run from a fourth-floor apartment in a suburb of the Indian tech city Gurugram and its mastermind is 31-year-old Aditya Jain — an occasional TV cybersecurity pundit.
The article claims that while Mr. Jain acknowledged having “hacked persons in the past,” he also asserted that he “did not know some of the people named on his database and denied hacking the others listed.”
According to the article, Mr. Jain oversaw a network of hackers for seven years who were employed by British private investigators to breach targets’ email accounts and seize control of their computers’ cameras and microphones.
Criminals allegedly targeted more than 100 victims’ private email accounts, including critics of Qatar who threatened to reveal misconduct by the Gulf state in the lead-up to this month’s World Cup.
Mr Jain said he was hired for the project to target the critics by a Swiss-based investigator named Jonas Rey but confirmed the ultimate client was Qatar. The allegations have been denied by the lawyers of the Qatar government, the report added.
The report also found that at least seven of Mr Jain’s clients included British private investigators.
Many of the targets were British lawyers and members of wealthy families including two of the UK’s richest families, Ashok Hinduja and Robert Tchenguiz, the report revealed.
