An obscure IT firm from Delhi called BellTroX InfoTech Services has allegedly been running ‘hack for hire’ services to help clients spying on over 10,000 email accounts over a period of seven years.
BellTroX InfoTech Services operating from a small room in a west-Delhi had targeted high-level email accounts including those of European government officials, gambling tycoons in the Bahamas, and big-time investors in the United States including equity giant KKR and Muddy Waters, Reuters reported.
Other targets of the company include judges based in South Africa, politicians in Mexico, lawyers based in France, environmental groups and journalists from the US.
BellTroX targeted its victims with malicious emails, some imitating colleagues or relatives while others disguising as graphic notifications to unsubscribe from pornography websites, the report said.
Toronto-based Internet watchdog Citizen Lab had spent over two years investigating the Delhi firm’s hacking operations.
"This is one of the largest spy-for-hire operations ever exposed," said Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton as quoted by the report.
Reuters also reviewed what was essentially a “digital hit list” based on cached data with the firm’s targets from 2013 to 2020.
The firm’s operations targeting American victims are under investigation by US law enforcement however, the US Justice Department had declined to comment as per the report. The forms founder who had been declared a fugitive in 2017 after a 2015 hacking case being investigated by the US denied any wrongdoing, it said.