Indian IT Company BellTrox gain spotlight on U.S. case over its global cyber operations
A year-long legal disputing battle going on between Iranian-American businessman Farhad Azima and the Investment Authority of Ras Al Khaimah (RKIA), one of UAE’s seven emirates, has now involved Indian hacking firms (BellTrox) into their legal battle.
An Indian IT company BellTrox founded in 2013 based in New Delhi, which offered hack as a service to its clients and also been involved in a long-year hacking campaign for its clients to spy on 10,000 email accounts targeting government officials in Europe, and gambling tycoons in the Bahamas. It was owned by Sumit Gupta.
BellTrox was also previously charged in a 2015 hacking case in which two U.S. private investigators admitted for paying him heavy amounts to hack the accounts of marketing executives.
However, Sumit Gupta denied the above hacking attempt but a Canada-based The Citizen lab, an internet watchdog group, was able to identify BellTrox employee’s involvement behind this attack. They had exposed the hack-for-hire operation in its detailed report in 2020 stating that they “had high confidence” to link Dark Basin to BellTrox based on the infrastructure used in this cyber espionage campaign.
In a lawsuit filed in North Carolina court, Farhad Azima accused U.S. law firm Dechert LLP for hiring a private investigator, Nicholas Del Rosso, over allegedly helping Ras Al Khaimah (Middle Eastern Emirate) for hacking his emails who then allegedly hired hackers in India BellTrox and CyberRoot Risk Advisory to steal documents from Azima.
In his lawsuit, Azima describes how law firms allegedly hire hackers from India. Such relationships are common in hacking-for-hire schemes because intermediaries are used to making hacking attempts and make the investigators difficult to reach the ultimate source responsible for that.
In the above allegation, Sumit Gupta denied any such hacking attempt and said he had never been contacted by law enforcement. He said he had only helped the private investigators to download messages from email inboxes after they provided him with login details and only helped them with technical support.
The above article depicts that Middle Eastern companies lured Indian hackers with heavy amounts for doing cyber espionage activities for their nation. And since they have the capacity, they have been delivering as per the demand.
