Bengaluru: On February 12, then Karnataka home minister Basavaraj Bommai in a review meeting told the told the top brass of the state police to make priority cybercrime originating from the dark web their priority. Bommai had then said the police have cracked some cases, but they were only the tip of the iceberg.
The statement came months after the Karnataka police arrested 25-year-old Srikrishna, who had allegedly hacked into three bitcoin exchanges, multiple online poker applications and one government e-procurement website. Bitcoins worth ₹9 crore were recovered from him, which he had either stolen using data theft or through online extortion. He is also accused in the case of stealing ₹11 crore from the e-procurement portal.
It was this case that prompted Bommai to give the police a new direction, which has now snowballed into a controversy where the Opposition is accusing the government of trying to cover up the case.
Srikrishna was caught on November 18 after police arrested some drug dealers, to whom he had allegedly sold drugs procured from the dark web. Srikrishna graduated in computer science from a college in Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 2017.
A senior police officer said Srikrishna would encrypt data and demand payment from owners for the site to be unlocked by attacking the sites online. “After returning to Bengaluru, he could not find any job. He then started hacking gaming and other websites to steal data. He also used to create mirror sites and get information on credit or debit cards used by people who accessed the sites to steal money,” the senior officer said requesting anonymity.
Police said Srikrishna used online gaming platforms with chat boxes to communicate with buyers of data but mostly, he would walk up to people on the road and ask if he could use their phone claiming he had lost his own. “He would tell them he had to get in touch with someone urgently and download Wickr app on the stranger’s phone,” the officer said.
Wickr is an encrypted messaging app, which also has a ‘burn-on-read’ setting, where the recipient will have access to the message only […]
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