How Pak spy 'Sejal Kapoor' scored 98 Indian targets
The arrest of Hisar-based woman travel vlogger Jyoti Malhotra on charges of spying and passing sensitive information to Pakistan has brought to the fore Pakistani intelligence agency's strategy to snare Indians with love and lies. Malhotra is not the first Indian to fall into the
ISI honeytrap
. Before her many men and women have been lured into spying by the ISI.
How easy it is to use love and romance as a trap is evident from the case of ISI spy '
Sejal Kapoor
' who compromised 98 targets within a few years with just a fake social media identity, TOI had reported in 2019. 'Sejal Kapoor' was one of a whole beehive of Pakistani spies posing as young Indian women with alluring names to honeytrap Indian defence officials.
A Pakistani spy, operating from within Pakistan, used the name 'Sejal Kapoor' to create a Facebook account and managed to hack into the computer systems of more than 98 officials from various departments, including the Indian Army, Air Force, Navy, paramilitary forces and state police personnel in Rajasthan, MP, Punjab and UP between 2015 and 2018.
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How 'Sejal Kapoor' trapped her targets
Sejal's Facebook profile said she was an employee of Hays Aviation in the UK. She trapped her targets by showing her videos and pictures with the help of a software malware released from a third-party server hosted in a West Asian country. She was involved in the case related to the leak of classified data on the BrahMos missile in 2018. The UP anti-terrorism squad (ATS) and military intelligence (MI) came to know about her with the arrest of BrahMos senior systems missile projects engineer Nishant Agarwal who was one of her victims.
In 2019, TOI had accessed her chats and the details of a malware used by her. Malware is malicious software specifically designed to gain access to or damage a computer, usually without the knowledge of the owner.
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Sleuths in UP Police and MI unearthed more than five dozen chats of this female spy. "Well, install whisper n check your desktop icon, open it and send me the code, lets talk there," the Pakistani spy said in one of the chats. "Waiting dude? Installed? After installing u will see Whisper icon on ur desktop. Just send me the code, then we will good to go. just unzip it. n click install. it's a chat app dude In UK, we all use that," she said. "Nope, its restricted. Its getting restricted. Whenever am trying to install it," an Indian official, the target she was chatting with, replied.
Spy application used by Sejal worked on stealth mode and had "self-aware" detection techniques which made them extremely difficult to be recognised by anti-malware programmes installed in computers. "It's a malicious communication app. It uses a malware command. A hacker can use as many as 25 internet addresses to mask her identity," a top intelligence official, closely monitoring the probe, had told TOI in 2019.
"Instantly, after getting downloaded, the malware first prompts the user to key in a code. It's to ensure that the app is not a virus or malware. Immediately after that, it scans all latest attachments sent from the computer in emails or downloads. It then scans all files with photographs, databases of MS Word and MS Excel, by first verifying their encryption keys and then opening their passwords," the intelligence official said.
One of 'Sejal''s victims was a BrahMos engineer
An engineer of BrahMos Aerospace Pvt Ltd associated with its missile projects in Nagpur was arrested in 2018 in a joint operation by the UP ATS, its Maharashtra counterpart and Military Intelligence on charges of passing on classified information about the project to Pakistan's ISI.
The arrested official, Nishant Agarwal, was a senior systems engineer at BrahMos Aerospace's unit at Butibori, near Nagpur. In his mid-20s, Agarwal headed the Hydraulics-Pneumatics and Warhead Integration wing of BrahMos' production department. Agarwal was managing a team of 40 personnel, including systems engineers, technical supervisors and technicians. He was also supervising the new projects at BrahMos' sites in Nagpur and Pilani, UP ATS officials said, adding that he had won the government's 'Young Scientist Award' for 2017-18.
Pankaj Awasthi, a UP-ATS investigation officer, said in his deposition during Agrawal's trial that 'Sejal' introduced herself to Agrawal as a recruiter from Hays Aviation, and as a student from Manchester to another victim, a former IAF staffer. Agrawal was also Facebook friends with two other individuals, 'Neha Sharma' and 'Pooja Ranjan', whose accounts too were active from Pakistan, testified Awasthi. Agrawal had chatted with 'Sejal' on Linked-in too, where she showed interest in hiring him. Awasthi told the court that on Sejal's directions, Agrawal had clicked on links sent by her and installed three apps - Qwhisper, Chat to Hire and X-trust - on his personal laptop.
If ISI can access secret information by trapping Indian officials with fake Facebook accounts operating from within Pakistan, trapping prominent social media influencers like Jyoti Malhotra points at a bigger intelligence project.
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