A Mumbai police officer’s email was apparently hacked and used to deliver malware to government buildings in a nefarious plan that appears to link to Pakistan. According to reports, the emails were sent with a subject line about an intelligence report about terror activity in Jammu and Kashmir. The emails contained a PDF document that, when opened, infected the recipient’s machine. According to police officials, a preliminary investigation indicated that the email was sent from Pakistan’s Punjab province.
The police email ID breach is the second time a state government body has been hacked. A malware infestation triggered a catastrophic power system collapse on October 12, 2020, resulting in an outage in Mumbai and its neighboring areas for many hours.
At the time of the occurrence, no one thought a malware assault was to blame for the grid outage. When the state administration filed a report on the problem earlier this year, it was revealed that Chinese hackers were to blame.
The topic of the PDF file attached to the phishing email is “Terrorists behind JK Attack shot down in Mumbai.” According to reports, the subject line is “Intelligence Inputs” to make it look credible.
The police have urged recipients of the email not to open the attachment since it might result in a malware infection and therefore information theft.
According to analysts, hackers may have utilized software to get access to the east region cyber cell’s email ID and password, as well as decode data. When cyber specialists attempted to access the entire list of target emails during a preliminary inquiry, they were unable to do so.
Officials stated that they were attempting to track down the hackers on a technical level.
