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EXCLUSIVE: OBSCURE INDIAN CYBER FIRM SPIED ON POLITICIANS, INVESTORS WORLDWIDE

By Jack Stubbs, Raphael Satter, Christopher Bing

7 Min Read

(This June 9 story corrects to remove reference to speaking with Gupta at his
office)

Fahmi Quadir, founder of Safkhet Capital, poses in New York City, New York,
U.S., June 9, 2020. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

LONDON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A little-known Indian IT firm offered its hacking
services to help clients spy on more than 10,000 email accounts over a period of
seven years.

New Delhi-based BellTroX InfoTech Services targeted government officials in
Europe, gambling tycoons in the Bahamas, and well-known investors in the United
States including private equity giant KKR and short seller Muddy Waters,
according to three former employees, outside researchers, and a trail of online
evidence.

Aspects of BellTroX’s hacking spree aimed at American targets are currently
under investigation by U.S. law enforcement, five people familiar with the
matter told Reuters. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment.

Reuters does not know the identity of BellTroX’s clients. In a telephone
interview, the company’s owner, Sumit Gupta, declined to disclose who had hired
him and denied any wrongdoing.

Muddy Waters founder Carson Block said he was “disappointed, but not surprised,
to learn that we were likely targeted for hacking by a client of BellTroX.” KKR
declined to comment.

Researchers at internet watchdog group Citizen Lab, who spent more than two
years mapping out the infrastructure used by the hackers, released a report here
on Tuesday saying they had "high confidence" that BellTroX employees were behind
the espionage campaign.

“This is one of the largest spy-for-hire operations ever exposed,” said Citizen
Lab researcher John Scott-Railton.

Although they receive a fraction of the attention devoted to state-sponsored
espionage groups or headline-grabbing heists, “cyber mercenary” services are
widely used, he said. “Our investigation found that no sector is immune.”

A cache of data reviewed by Reuters provides insight into the operation,
detailing tens of thousands of malicious messages designed to trick victims into
giving up their passwords that were sent by BellTroX between 2013 and 2020. The
data was supplied on condition of anonymity by online service providers used by
the hackers after Reuters alerted the firms to unusual patterns of activity on
their platforms.

The data is effectively a digital hit list showing who was targeted and when.
Reuters validated the data by checking it against emails received by the
targets.

On the list: judges in South Africa, politicians in Mexico, lawyers in France
and environmental groups in the United States. These dozens of people, among the
thousands targeted by BellTroX, did not respond to messages or declined comment.

Reuters was not able to establish how many of the hacking attempts were
successful.

BellTroX’s Gupta was charged in a 2015 hacking case in which two U.S. private
investigators admitted to paying him to hack the accounts of marketing
executives. Gupta was declared a fugitive in 2017, although the U.S. Justice
Department declined to comment on the current status of the case or whether an
extradition request had been issued.

Speaking by phone from his home in New Delhi, Gupta denied hacking and said he
had never been contacted by law enforcement. He said he had only ever helped
private investigators download messages from email inboxes after they provided
him with login details.

“I didn’t help them access anything, I just helped them with downloading the
mails and they provided me all the details,” he told Reuters. “I am not aware
how they got these details but I was just helping them with the technical
support.”

Reuters could not determine why the private investigators might need Gupta to
download emails. Gupta did not return follow-up messages. Spokesmen for Delhi
police and India’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

HOROSCOPES AND PORNOGRAPHY

Operating from a small room above a shuttered tea stall in a west-Delhi retail
complex, BellTroX bombarded its targets with tens of thousands of malicious
emails, according to the data reviewed by Reuters. Some messages would imitate
colleagues or relatives; others posed as Facebook login requests or graphic
notifications to unsubscribe from pornography websites.

Fahmi Quadir’s New York-based short selling firm Safkhet Capital was among 17
investment companies targeted by BellTroX between 2017 and 2019. She said she
noticed a surge in suspicious emails in early 2018, shortly after she launched
her fund.

Initially “it didn’t seem necessarily malicious,” Quadir said. “It was just
horoscopes; then it escalated to pornography.”

Eventually the hackers upped their game, sending her credible-sounding messages
that looked like they came from her coworkers, other short sellers or members of
her family. “They were even trying to emulate my sister,” Quadir said, adding
that she believes the attacks were unsuccessful.

U.S. advocacy groups were also repeatedly targeted. Among them were digital
rights organizations Free Press and Fight for the Future, both of whom have
lobbied for net neutrality. The groups said a small number of employee accounts
were compromised, but the wider organizations' networks were untouched. The
spying on those groups was detailed in a report here by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation in 2017, but has not been publicly tied to BellTroX until now.

Timothy Karr, a director at Free Press, said his organization “sees an uptick in
breach attempts whenever we’re engaged in heated and high-profile public policy
debates.” Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, said: “When
corporations and politicians can hire digital mercenaries to target civil
society advocates, it undermines our democratic process.”

While Reuters was not able to establish who hired BellTroX to carry out the
hacking, two former employees said the company and others like it were usually
contracted by private investigators on behalf of business rivals or political
opponents.

Bart Santos of San Diego-based Bulldog Investigations was one of a dozen private
detectives in the United States and Europe who told Reuters they had received
unsolicited advertisements for hacking services out of India - including one
from a person who described himself as a former BellTroX employee. The pitch
offered to carry out “data penetration” and “email penetration.”

Santos said he ignored those overtures, but could understand why some people
didn’t. “The Indian guys have a reputation for customer service,” he said.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Pal in NEW DELHI and Ryan McNeill in LONDON;
Editing by Jonathan Weber, Chris Sanders and Edward Tobin

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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