Big exposure of India based “Hack for Hire” industry

Since hacking is illegal, the industry is highly secretive and it is rare that any information leaks about the illicit practices. TBIJ and Sunday times team began an undercover investigation to talk to the hackers themselves.
Two reporters created a fake corporate investigation company based in Mayfair called Beaufort Intelligence and posed as recently retired members of Britain’s secret services.The reporters then messaged suspected hackers in India saying they were seeking to employ a cyber investigator to help them gather information on their client’s targets. When the replies came back, they flew to Delhi in February.

One of the first hackers to respond was a man calling himself “Mahendra Singh”. His LinkedIn networking page was brazen: his skills were listed as “android hacking”, “mobile phone monitoring” and “email tracing and penetration”.
 

The reporters met him for coffee at the Leela Palace hotel just outside Delhi’s diplomatic enclave.
His first admission was that he was using a false name. He was in fact Tej Singh Rathore. There would be many more confessions.
 

First, Rathore explained how he had become a hacker. He said he had switched to an “ethical hacking” course while studying information technology at the Rajasthan Technical University in Kota because he recognised it was an “emerging industry”.
After graduating with a first-class degree in 2014, he had taken a job at a cybersecurity company based in Amritsar, the north-western Indian city, where his boss let him in on a secret. Computer “offensive work” – the term used for hacking – was much better paid than “defensive work” protecting systems, his boss told him.
 

The choice was clear. Rathore struck out on his own and wrote to corporate intelligence companies on LinkedIn touting his hacking skills. The work that came in would transport him into a world of marital disputes, corporate espionage and murder.
His first job, he says, was for a winemaker in New Jersey. The winemaker wanted Rathore to hack her husband’s email to find out about his financial situation before she divorced him.
One particularly lucrative assignment was from a Belgian equestrian who commissioned him to hack a wealthy stable owner in Germany. “I charged my client from Belgium $20,000 for [breaking into] a single email [account],” he recalled.
He also became involved in one of Canada’s most notorious double-murders. In December 2017, the billionaire Barry Sherman and his wife, Honey, had been found dead next to the indoor swimming pool in their Toronto home. They had been strangled with leather belts.

Read full story at TBIJ