In eight years, BellTroX InfoTech Services has hacked over 10,000 email accounts.
An obscure little Indian IT company provides hacking services and has hacked over 10,000 email accounts in eight years.
Delhi-registered BellTroX InfoTech Services attacked European government officials, Bahamas casino moguls and high-profile US investors, including companies such as KKR and Muddy Waters. This was reported to Reuters news agency by three former employees of the company and third-party researchers. BellTroX attacks on US targets are currently under investigation, but the Justice Department has not commented on the situation.
In a telephone conversation with Reuters reporters, BellTroX owner Sumit Gupta declined to name the company’s customers, but said it was not doing anything illegal.
Muddy Waters founder Carson Block said he was “disappointed but not surprised” that the company could be a target for hackers. KKR declined to comment.
Citizen Lab specialists, who have been studying the infrastructure used by cybercriminals for more than two years, are confident that BellTroX employees are behind the cyberespionage campaign. “This is one of the largest paid cyber-espionage operations disclosed,” said Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton, noting that “hacker-for-hire” services are now very popular.
The cache of data studied by Reuters experts gives an idea of the operation carried out by the company. Hackers developed tens of thousands of malicious messages that were sent to victims to extort passwords from them between 2013 and 2020. This data is actually a digital list of targets with dates of cyberattacks. It was not possible to establish how many attempts of attacks were crowned with success.
Source: Security Lab
