Hackers for Hire in your Basin

Businesses, and anyone caught in a bad-tempered divorce, should be on the alert for mercenary hackers for hire.

Firms large and small have been victim to keypad for hire gunslingers who possess tech savvy skills to breach the most sophisticated defences. 

The Japanese car giant Honda became one of the latest high profile victims to announce it had suffered an attack in June last year. 

One band of tech gunslingers for hire who were posted over the web were identified, oddly,  as the ‘Dark Basin’. How a kitchen fitting equipment can be mythologised with the glamourous moniker ‘Dark’ is confusing to the author of this blog, however, members of the Dark Basin caused havoc for Honda.

Most of their attacks involved “phishing” attempts, in which  the hackers for hire try to trick targets into handing over usernames and passwords. 

Emails that appear to come from friends or colleagues contain links that, when clicked on, reveal convincing replicas of legitimate sites such as social networks or email providers. 

Anyone attempting to log in would be handing their username and password to the hackers for hire. Some victims were bombarded almost daily with carefully crafted emails whose details suggested the hackers for hire knew quite a bit about them. 

Those mysterious members of the Dark Basin may have remained in the shadows and beyond public scrutiny if they hadn’t fallen for the classic criminal behaviour. An inability to keep their big mouth’s shut, or in the words of the author, being a ‘gobshite’.

Online bragging led investigators to BellTroX InfoTech Services, a New Delhi Internet security consultancy. 

BellTroX’s boss, Sumit Gupta, has been in trouble before. Along with several American private investigators, he was indicted on a separate set of hackers for hire charges in California in 2015. 

And as one hacking pest crawls under a stone another will emerge to take advantage of a unsuspecting firm’s lax online security.