DECODING DARK WEB

Digital disruption has brought with it the advent of a safe haven for cyber crooks, posing a great threat to personal finance

- Madhuparna Roy Sukul

Ulike its dubious peers, the instant loan app didn’t ask for access to his personal details and promised to lend Rs 10,000 within two hours of filling up some basic credentials. It took Balaji Vijayaraghavan barely 30 seconds to download SnapIt. And an hour later, he received a text message from his bank, saying that Rs 1 lakh was debited from his account.

It was a typical case of a data breach. The criminology graduate handled the situation firmly. He immediately blocked all his bank accounts and got in touch with Save Them India Foundation, a non-government organization, to investigate the cybersecurity aspects of the incident.

Balaji discovered that although he did not log into the app, neither gave access to any other apps like contacts, camera or galleries, the hackers managed to invade his phone with 59 malware. The fraudsters actually hijacked his phone and used it to send text messages and read OTPs received. This gave them access to his bank account.

The bank account was perhaps used for money laundering activities like using cryptocurrency for dark web transactions or, put it simply, to turn dirty money clean. The incident was published in details in a news portal.

Balaji’s was just one of the innumerable cybercrime cases reported every year in India and abroad. A raging wave of digitalization and a life increasingly dependent on apps are largely setting the perfect stage for cybercrime. While SPECOPS data from 2006 to 2020 shows that the US leads the pack of countries hit hardest by cyberattacks, the threat landscape has grown significantly for India during the pandemic. From your identity and bank account details to vaccine or eyes, you think of it, and it’s on sale on the dark web.