Cyber Attack On Mumbai Police Cyber Cell: Email Hacked, Malicious Mail Sent To Other Units

MUMBAI: The growing threat of cyber attacks has made Mumbai police its target. Cybercriminals on Tuesday hacked the email ID of Mumbai police’s east region cyber cell. Through the hacked ID, phishing emails with infected PDF attachments were forwarded to other police cells.

In the recent past, this is the second such major incident where a cyber attack was carried out on the Maharashtra government’s critical entity. Earlier in October 2020 power grid outage was caused by malware.

According to the officials, the subject of the malicious PDF file attached to the phishing email is “Terrorists behind JK gunned down in Mumbai.” According to sources, the subject line reads “Intelligence Inputs” to make it appear official.

Cyber Police have begun investigations, but no arrests have been made. Experts are working to recover all emails from the address- eastcyber.mum@mahapolice.gov.in.

This id belongs to the east region cyber police station and bears the name of the station’s in-charge, senior inspector Rajesh Shivajirao Nagawade.

Following the incident, the Maharashtra cyber police alerted all of the state’s police commissioners and district police superintendents on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, the deputy commissioner of police (DCP), cyber wing, paid a visit to the police station to conduct more investigations.

The police have cautioned recipients of the email not to open the file because doing so could result in a malware infection and hence information theft.

According to experts, it is thought that hackers used software to get access to the east region cyber cell’s email ID and password and decrypt data. When cyber professionals attempted to access the entire list of target emails during a preliminary assessment, they were unable to do so.

Officials stated that they were trying to track down the hackers on a technical level.

Cyber crime experts said that these attacks are only going to increase and the best way to avert them is by staying prepared. Updating technical arsenal can help government and law enforcement agencies to fight such situations.

“It is important for state and central governments to invest in procuring cyber defensive technologies and solutions for safeguarding the communication of law enforcement agencies. Incidents like this have exposed the financial willingness that is missing in the overall setup of secured infrastructure architecture,” said Mumbai based cyber expert Smith Gonsalves.

Gonsalves added that the minimum requirements for avoiding such issues are pushing 2-factor authentication, endpoint & Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions on consumers who operate in sensitive departments which are missing at government institutional ends.

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