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The government at the highest level is concerned about the possibility of this being a new conspiracy against India to dent its economy by derailing sectors like aviation and hospitality
The first 24 to 48 hours of threats that turned out to be hoaxes were greeted with absolute chaos. (Representational photo/PTI)
It is two weeks and counting. Close to 500 calls, emails, and social media posts have been made since mid-October about bombs on airlines associated with India. Wednesday morning saw six more alerts which turned out to be hoaxes.
Is this a prank? Or a conspiracy? Why have Indian agencies not managed to unmask the people behind these hoax alerts? It is a question that is troubling the government at the highest level.
Response
The first 24 to 48 hours of threats that turned out to be hoaxes were greeted with absolute chaos. Flights were delayed and called back. In one case, Singapore had to scramble jets to ensure the safety of an Air India Express flight that had received a bomb threat. In the latest case, an Air India Mumbai-Indore flight was threatened with a pipe bomb which turned out to be a hoax. An FIR has been registered. Officials said that close to 40 FIRs have been filed so far across the country.
The entire standard operating procedure (SOP) for civil aviation security has been revamped. Cargo areas were sanitised and fresh guidelines were given to airlines on the SOP to follow. While the level of panic, as per security officials dealing with airports, has gone down, each time a bomb alert comes, it does lead to additional checks affecting passenger convenience.
Probe so far
At least 15 social media handles were flagged for sending these hoax messages.
Schizophrenic, Psychotic human, and Adam Lanza were some handles on platform X that Indian agencies flagged for sending hoax threats.
Each one sent multiple threat messages before they were blocked, only to reappear in a different avatar using the same name with various numerical combinations.
Traced abroad
The Intelligence Bureau working in tandem with the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security and specialised cells within various state police has identified the VPN that has been used to send these hoax alerts. Security grid officials said that at least in two cases, Germany and the UK have turned out to be the VPN locations.
But this is where Indian agencies are being stonewalled. Officials said that tracing an IP address from a VPN is routinely done by investigating agencies. But in this case, it appears a private VPN with layers of encryption has been used to mask the IP address. “Such private VPNs don’t come cheap and the countries in the West offer privacy to those who pay for these. Hence we have not received the kind of cooperation that we were expecting,” an official said.
The security grid suspects that the VPN location traced to the UK and Germany could have been further outsourced to smaller countries for operations. “These could be in Africa or smaller countries in South America. If someone has made so much effort in keeping his or her identity secret, it can’t be an ordinary prankster,” an official in the civil aviation ministry said.
Arrest made
The Mumbai police in collaboration with Chhattisgarh police picked up a minor for a hoax social media post. Questioning revealed he had an old enmity with the individual whose account he hacked. On Monday, Nagpur cops arrested another man for sending threatening emails to airlines, hotels, ministers, and police officials. But central agencies believe that these are individuals who used the current trend of hoax calls to grind their personal axes. The real conspirator(s) might still be at large. One of the IDs, Adam Lanza, threatened top hotels in Lucknow too, demanding a ransom of $55,000.
The IT ministry has taken up the issue with social media platforms to block such serial offenders automatically. But the response has not been satisfactory, as per officials. The civil aviation ministry is pushing for changes to law so that life imprisonment can be given to such hoax callers.
The National Investigation Agency, informally, is also scanning cyberspace to identify the “serial hoaxer”. However, the government at the highest level is concerned about the possibility of this being a new conspiracy against India to dent its economy by derailing sectors like aviation and hospitality.