'A Hacker Group Has Been Framing People for Crimes They Didn't Commit'

A "shadowy hacker group" named Modified Elephant has been targeting people throughout India "for at least a decade," reports Gizmodo, "sometimes using its digital powers to plant fabricated evidence of criminal activity on their devices. That phony evidence has, in turn, often provided a pretext for the victims' arrest."

They cite a new report from cybersecurity firm Sentinel One "illuminating the way in which its digital dirty tricks have been used to surveil and target "human rights activists, human rights defenders, academics, and lawyers" throughout India. The most prominent case involving Elephant centers around Maoist activist Rona Wilson and a group of his associates who, in 2018, were arrested by India security services and accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Evidence for the supposed plot — including a word document detailing plans to assassinate the nation's prime minister, Narendra Modi — was found on the Wilson's laptop. However, later forensic analysis of the device showed that the documents were actually fake and had been artificially planted using malware. According to Sentinel researchers, it was Elephant that put them there.

This case, which gained greater exposure after being covered by the Washington Post, was blown open after the aforementioned laptop was analyzed by a digital forensics firm, Boston-based Arsenal Consulting. Arsenal ultimately concluded that Wilson and all of his so-called co-conspirators, as well as many other activists, had been targeted with digital manipulation....

According to the Sentinel One's report, Elephant uses common hacking tools and techniques to gain a foothold in victims' computers. Phishing emails, typically tailored to the victim's interests, are loaded with malicious documents that contain commercially available remote access tools (RATs) — easy-to-use programs available on the dark web that can hijack computers....

An entirely different group is believed to have conducted similar operations against Baris Pehlivan, a journalist in Turkey who was incarcerated for 19 months in 2016 after the Turkish government accused him of terrorism. Digital forensics later revealed that the documents used to justify Pehlivan's charges had been artificially implanted, much like those on Wilson's laptop.

Funny that these hacker groups

[rsilvergun]

Always seem to Target groups that the right wing, pro corporate Modi government is in opposition to. I'm sure that's just a happy little coincidence.

Re: Funny that these hacker groups

[alexgieg]

Around the world the right is almost 100% of the time pro-corporate. The US case, in which the right is kind of anti-corporate, and the left it kind of pro-corporate, is a very odd exception to the rule.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[alexgieg]

The left isn't pro-corporate in America, and the right certainly isn't anti-corporate.

That's because there isn't really a "left" in the US. In the full political spectrum, Democrats are center-right and Republicans are right. Democrats can be called "left" only in relative terms, as being "to the left of" the GOP, but that's about it. So, what you have over there is two distinct rights with mostly distinct preferences over which corporates to favor, and which to oppose, and a little overlap.

The distinction on which corporates to favor and oppose is what gives the GOP a certain "flavor" of be

There is a left here

[rsilvergun]

but it's largely silenced by our media via a process known as "Manufactured Consent".

A great example of this is reddit's r/politics thread, where only stories from a few major news outlets are allowed, effectively limiting political discourse for the sake of making the mod's jobs easier.

This is nothing, compared to EU/USA...

[Brane2]

Childporn servers across NATO members:
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
target "harvest" on a massive scale:
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
and much more:
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]

Re:This is nothing, compared to EU/USA...

[Retired Chemist]

I am not sure I would believe anything I found on a reddit conspiracy forum. The Indian or Turkish governments have done much more basic things to attack opponents.

Re:

[sheph]

I'm not sure I'd dismiss it out of hand just because it's on a conspiracy forum. When you consider there's a very small group of folks who control almost everything including what you see in the news, what you're taught in school, what search results you get back, what medical care you get, etc. Sometimes the conspiracy theory turns out to be the truth that looks unbelievable because of how we've been manipulated. This is just my personal experience.

I thought only police planted evidence.

[iamnotx0r]

Imagine anyone else doing the same. (DA's, guberment, spouses, etc)

Re: I thought only police planted evidence.

[alexgieg]

Spouses? No need to imagine, this is as old as courtrooms.

An example was my mother. She wanted custody of my brother and me in the early 1980's and absolutely zero visitation rights for my father. This was in then ultraconservative Brazil, amidst a right-wing military dictatorship, with judges appointed by the military, so, very easy. She paid a transvestite prostitute to appear in court and explain to the judge the torrid relationship he had with my father, and paid two other persons to testify to the veracity of the first one, saying they saw my father visiting the prostitute's apartment etc. That very day she got exactly what she wanted: 100% custody of us, and no visitation rights for my father.

Nothing new. Just the same old thing, but "on a computer!" and "on the Internet!" Probably patentable even.

Re:

[cascadingstylesheet]

Spouses? No need to imagine, this is as old as courtrooms.

An example was my mother. She wanted custody of my brother and me in the early 1980's and absolutely zero visitation rights for my father. This was in then ultraconservative Brazil, amidst a right-wing military dictatorship, with judges appointed by the military, so, very easy. She paid a transvestite prostitute to appear in court and explain to the judge the torrid relationship he had with my father, and paid two other persons to testify to the veracity of the first one, saying they saw my father visiting the prostitute's apartment etc. That very day she got exactly what she wanted: 100% custody of us, and no visitation rights for my father.

Right.

And now that we have no-fault divorce (er, not exactly from the right), she would today have had to frame your father for child abuse. So much better!

It's almost like it's the framing and false accusations that are wrong ...

Re:

[Sique]

The Republican lead investigation revealed how much Russia interfered in the 2016 election, and courts have convicted people involved in the different schemes. Apparently you are putting to much faith in the Democratic Party and their abilities.

Re:

[Sique]

In the same way that Al Capone never was convicted of booze smuggling, racketeering and committing or ordering murders. The tax charges were the easiest to prove and the easiest to convict him, and they made the most money for the tax revenue.

Re:

[LKM]

Are you saying that the Democrats installed Manafort in the Trump campaign so that he could frame Trump by passing data on to Russia? Dayum, that's one hell of a false-flag operation. Props to the Democrats for pulling it off, that's an incredible achievment.

Just an educated guess

[RogueWarrior65]

A Maoist activist? The phone is probably loaded with real evidence. No need to fabricate any.

Oldest excuse in the book

[shm]

âoeMy account was hacked.â

Politicians of all flavours in India say this when caught with something unsavory, be it âoelikingâ a porn image or when caught with terrorist materials.

In this particular case one thing does not make sense. How did this analysis take place when the computer in question is supposed to be in the possession of the investigating agency?

Re:Oldest excuse in the book

[fafalone]

You could, you know, read the reports. I know, I know, it's /. and we don't take kindly to folks who read more than the summary, let alone the underlying primary material. But I did it anyway, so I'll answer. They had disk images sent to a forensic investigation company. The company made an airtight case the material was planted. There were numerous leftover logs and recovered data that showed how the malware got in, that it downloaded identical files and copied them to the hard drive before deleting the originals (using UnRAR.exe renamed Adobe.exe and also downloaded by the malware), where they had never been assigned an NTFS OBJECT_ID, indicating they had never been interacted with, and were edited with Word 2010 when only Word 2007 had ever been installed (and the allegation was authoring them, not simple possession). They found the same malware doing the same thing in other activist's computers.

Re:

[shm]

I did read the report.

After some initial sarcasm, I was wondering how these analysts got hold of this Wilson fellow's disk images when the devices are supposed to be in the possession of the NIA

Great

[Vinegar Joe]

Another story about the Clintons that will be ignored.

Same as the US

[tomhath]

This isn't really much different from what Hillary Clinton's campaign did back in 2016. Fabricate a "Russian Collusion" narrative, plant the "evidence" and convince the Obama administration to "investigate" the allegations. (Before down voting, read up on what Special Prosecutor Durham released last week).