Agencies of China, Romania and the United States have jointly acted with the India Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against cyber criminals in these countries who were allegedly hacking into US based websites.
According to sources from TOI, Amit Tiwari was arrested on the information shared by the FBI, which were interrogating a global hacker Guccifer for the past couple of days and might have disclosed name of his Indian partner in crime. Considering the involvement of international agencies in the probe, the CBI officials have been keeping the information confidential.
“Indian Central Bureau of Investigations revealed that Amit Tiwari had been operating www.hirehacker.net and www.anonymiti.com that offered hacking services at US$250-$500 a client.” He accessed more than 900 accounts between Feb 2011 and Feb 2013 out of which 171 were Indian victims. Amit received most of the payments from his clients via Western Union or PayPal. Currently additional investigations are under way to confirm whether the hacker had also accessed bank accounts or had any role to play in any malicious illegal online activities.
“The amount that the data is sold for depends on the bank balance of the person. There are amounts that have been fixed even for those people who have less than 500 dollars in their account. Accounts comprising sums such as $90,000 to $200,000 too have been hacked and the information sold.” as reported by Rediff
“The present operation is the outcome of a coordinated probe by the CBI, the FBI, Combating Organised Crime of Romania, and the Ministry of Public Security in China,” said a senior CBI officer. He also added that “The FBI shared with us the geographical location of the suspect, based on which we initiated the probe. A preliminary inquiry was instituted. Investigations revealed that the accused had been gaining unauthorized access to Internet accounts on behalf of his clients. We suspect that the targeted accounts belonged to individuals and corporate entities,”
The accused, identified as Amit Vikram Tiwari, 33, was arrested in 2003 for allegedly cheating a Mumbai-based credit card processing company by generating fake e-transactions through a website.
NDTV confirms that “ In addition to searches at Tiwari’s residence in Pune, the agency also carried out raids at hubs in Mumbai and Ghaziabad where people believed to have been his associates and clients were based.FBI has launched major operation against hackers located globally last year as part of which Romanian authorities arrested a hacker known as ‘Guccifer’ yesterday who was infamous for hacking into accounts of powerful leaders.It is alleged that ‘Guccifer’ leaked online Colin Powell’s personal emails, an unreleased script of Downton Abbey, and the paintings of George W Bush.Agency sources said they had no information about arrests made in Romania and China as it was the domain of authorities in those countries and it was only concerned with the probe in India.”
