Reference Material: How an unsophisticated malware attack became India’s biggest state-sponsored cybercrime

A complete chronology of the seven-year-long cyberattack (and it’s slow, horrific unravelling) carried out by the same threat actor against 16 human rights activists, who were resultantly incarcerated without trial under the UAPA for the alleged orchestration of the Bhima Koregaon violence at the start of 2018 and a made up plot to assassinate the prime minister of India. Christened by security firm Sentinel in 2022 after a series of tech investigations starting in 2019 with the discovery of a Trojan horse on researcher Rona Wilson’s seized system, the notorious ModifiedElephant has been targeting activists and HRDs in India since at least 2012 using extremely rudimentary means of surveillance, remote access, and file delivery, and worked directly with the Pune police (using IPS officer Shivaji Pawar’s contact information as its backway into the hacked systems) to frame members of the BK16. Worse still, the Pune FSL also protected ModifiedElephant, omitting…


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Mouli Sharma is a scholar of religion at Jamia Millia Islamia and a freelance journalist from New Delhi. Her work has appeared in Nivarana, Think Global Health, Feminism in India, The Leaflet, and NewsClick. She is a published photojournalist & illustrator and has been featured in The Hindu College Gazette and the quarterly Pink Disco. She is the editor-in-chief of the student-run news site, The Voice Express, and is a literary editor for the digital lit-mag, The Queer Gaze.


Prashant Rahi is an electrical and systems engineer, who completed his education from IIT, BHU, before eventually becoming a journalist for about a decade in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. He was the Chairperson for Human Rights and Democracy at the annual Indian Social Science Congresses held between 2011 and 2013, contributing to the theorisation of social activists’ and researchers’ experiences. Rahi devoted the greater part of his time and energy for revolutionary democratic changes as a grassroots activist with various collectives. For seven years, he worked as a Correspondent for The Statesman, chronicling the Uttarakhand statehood movement, while also participating in it. He has also contributed political articles for Hindi periodicals including Blitz, Itihasbodh, Samkaleen Teesri Duniya, Samayantar and Samkaleem Hastakshep. From his first arrest in 2007 December in a fake case, where he was charged as the key organiser of an imagined Maoist training camp in a forest area of Uttarakhand, to his release in March 2024 in the well-known GN Saibaba case, Rahi has been hounded as a prominent Maoist by the state for all of 17 years. In 2024, he joined The Polis Project as a roving reporter, focusing on social movements.