The Case of Cybercrime against Tekzilver.com

[Cybercrime Report. Uttar Pradesh, India. 2023]

Tekzilver.com, as we know it used to be a regular tech startup based out of Delhi, India. And they simply went about their business, starting, I think, mid/late 2017. Four years later, they were horrified to find that all their websites were hacked by cyber criminals and all their years of hard work simply went down the drain. How did it happen? Who did it? What did the police do? (Did they do anything at all?) Read on and find out for yourself. This is a real story that happened in India, a country that never stops chest-thumping and showing off its so-called “technical” prowess. Fact is, India is still in old stone-age when it comes to technology (yeah, Chandrayan is a good thing, but it happened in Karnataka.)

From the article published on Tekzilver.com, we know that the incident occurred in Nov 2021. The matter was promptly reported to the Noida Commissionerate in sector 108 on Nov 19th, 2021. But shockingly, the police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, did not bother to register an FIR. And the first struggle was to get the FIR registered, which was finally done in, believe it or not, July 2022! And that was a full 8 months after the complaint was placed in the Noida commissionerate!

Then came more shockers! The FIR (No.432/22) was registered in sector 39, Noida and handed over for investigation to an inspector in sector 24 Noida.And guess what? That inspector, who was the investigating officer for this case, had no tech knowledge and could not even figure out the difference between a website and an email! But the poor man at least accepted it upfront and Tekilver understood his problem. It meant more struggle for the victims.

Then, in March, 2023, that FIR was finally transferred to sector 36, “cyber” police station in Noida under a new FIR number, 15/2023. Apparently, all of Uttar Pradesh’s cyber punters were located there! But wait, remember this Uttar Pradesh, in India! Unbelievable as it might seem, the new investigating officer in the cyber police station was no different from the previous guy. In fact, this guy was worse. A rookie college passout called SI Ajeet Saxena, who had no idea how to even look at a website’s source code using something as simple as Ctrl+U was supposed to “investigate” this cyber crime.

As was expected, the investigation did not proceed anywhere. After almost 2 months of wasting time following up with this man, it turned out that the “actual” investigating officer was another person, called Inspector Lakshman Verma. Both these “cybercrime” investigators worked under their SHO, Rita Yadav. All three of them had zero tech knowledge and they were running a “cyber” police station, almost in the heart of Noida!

Wait! If you think that was the worst, you’re mistaken. Their senior officer was a man called ASP K. K. Saroj who sits in sector 82 “cyber” police station in Noida. That man was even worse. He simply said he “did not have a Ph.D in IT” and had no idea how to proceed. According to this ASP K.K. Saroj, it would take the state of Uttar Pradesh at least another 50 years to be able to do any investigation related to cyber crime. At this time, they had no people, no computers, and worse, no idea about cyber crime.

But this time, it was almost 2 years since the crime was first reported, way back in Nov 2021. And then came the shocker. The so called “cyber” police now declared that they had no idea how to proceed because they simply had no technical background! Now you might be think this is the worst that could have happened. But no. Remember, this is India and more specifically this is Uttar Pradesh. Anything can happen here, to anyone, at any time.

The Director General of UP police, a man called Vijaya Kumar sits in the Lucknow headquarters. His office was contacted but the man could not be reached through any means. His office worked so efficiently that if somebody sent him an email, they would need to call the office and check if they received it. Most of the time, the email simply disappeared! And the cycle of sending email and calling had to be repeated multiple times before they confirmed they received the email! But did anything happen? No. The DGP was no different from the SI and others in sector 36 cyber police station in Noida. Was this the worst that could have happened? No. There’s more.

In India there are two other organizations, well, actually three that are supposed to fight cyber crime. One is the Indian government’s website called cyercrime.gov.in and the other is an organization called CERT-in.(or Computer Emergency Response Team of India) under a Director-General, a man called Sanjay Bahl.

Both these organizations were contacted by Tekzilver and this is what they said:

Cybercrime.gov.in said they could help only if somebody called them when a cyber attack was underway. Else they would simply have to register a complaint on their website. But for that, their website had to first work. To be honest, it kinda worked in small gaps between extended down times. Same with their phones. If somebody gets past this, as did Tekzilver, and registers the complaint, it would simply get closed automatically after a few days, without any action taken whatsoever.

The big one came from CERT-in. They simply said they only knew how to block Chinese websites. Anything beyond that was too much for them!

The third organization is none other than the Indian Ministry of Electronics and IT (also known as MeITy, in short, under their minister Rajeev Chanderashekar) itself. When contacted, they simply said that they “only functioned like a post-office“! They only forwarded complaints to other departments!

With THIS kind of shitty background and completely defunct, incompetent police officers, look at what the politicians in the state and country say! The UP CM, Yogi Adityanath talked big about opening court complexes and inviting businesses into UP. The Indian PM talks like India is the only tech super power on planet earth. And yet, their own police are failing the citizens every day.

This incompetence of the police and government, both at the state and central levels is emboldening criminals to commit more crime because they know that the cops will never be able to find out even if they told them about it.

We spoke about the police, government and other organizations so far. But what about the criminals themselves? How did they do it?

The criminals, whose picture we published above, look like regular Joe’s at first glance. Two of them from Noida, Uttar Pradesh and the third man from Indore, Madhya Pradesh, all in India.The two Noida based criminals go by the name of Sudhanshu Sharma and Budhesh Chopra and the third is a man called Brijendra Sial who, apparently runs a web hosting company in Indore by the name of Bullten Web Hosting Solutions. The other two, run a number of sham “edtech ” companies, such as Digiversal Consultants, Writoversal, SSSI Online Tutoring Service-all funded through proceeds of cyber crime.

It turns out that this Brijendra Sial character was hired by the two Noida criminals, Sudhanshu Sharma and Budhesh Chopra to attack their competitors using Negative SEO, DDoS, Hacking, URL Manipulation and other tactics. And this man simply carried out his orders using his infrastructure of VPS hired from various hosting companies & service providers and community of like-minded cyber-criminals, who used their own as well as compromised devices.

The best part? The Uttar Pradesh “cyber”police still had no clue! Zero! Zilch!

Having said that, Tekzilver should drag these criminals to court. The incompetent police officers, including the DGP UP, Vijaya Kumar himself should be hauled up in court for running a sham cyber crime police station in the state with people who don’t know anything about technology. What about the other “senior” officers? Say, DG (cyber) Subhash Chandra or their “Cyber Singham” Triveni Singh? Where are these characters? Why has there been no inputs from these officers so far in these case? The public should be warned about these criminals and should stay away from their enterprises because its nothing but proceeds of crime.

We will also say this: the public should be even more careful of these kind of icompetent police officers in the UP police force. What they showed in bollywood movies is nothing compared to reality. These UP cops are much worse.

Tekzilver.com is an IT company and as far as we know them, they still have the option, skill and capacity to repay these criminals in kind, if the need or situation arises. Let’s see how it goes. The last we heard, Tekzilver.com was the target of a DDoS attack, but this time, the criminals could not breach their defences, and we doubt if they ever will, in the future.

Read the original article from Tekzilver.com

Tekzilver.com has even offered to train the UP police officers for free. Think about it, the victims of cyber crime wait for 2 years for the police to act an then when the cops fail to do so, they even offer to train them.

Names of Cyber Criminals

These criminals should be arrested immediately in order to protect the general public from cyber crime.

• Sudhanshu Sharma (Promoter of Digiversal Consultants, Writoversal, Noida)
• Budhesh Chopra (Promoter of Digiversal Consultants, SSSI Online tutoring Service, Noida)
• Brijendra Sial (Promoter of Bullten Web Hosting Solutions, Indore)

A secret squirrel told us that Sushanshu Sharma used to work for a company called Nerdy Turtlez before he started Digiversal Consultants. Budhesh Chopra used to work for Sudhanshu Sharma before he became his partner in cyber crime. We have not confirmed this report.

Names of Uttar Pradesh Police Officers (who did nothing)

These officers should be immediately fired from their jobs for incompetence and failure to perform their duty and as a result, putting the lives and businesses of citizens at risk.

• ASP K. K. Saroj (Sector 82, cyber police station, Noida)
• SHO Rita Yadav (Sector 36, cyber police station Noida)
• Inspector Lakshman Verma (Sector 36, cyber police station, Noida)
• SI Ajeet Saxena (Sector 36, cyber police station, Noida)

THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the real face of Uttar Pradesh and India. The police think they’re not accountable to the citizens of the country and are fully under the thumbs of politicians (or netas, as they call them in Hindi). Government institutions that are meant to provide relief to the common man, simply don’t work, in spite of what they say in public. News channels and media are by far too scared to say anything against the government for reasons best known to them. In all of this, criminals are laughing all the way to the bank because the polic are simply incompetent, irresponsible and unaccountable and the governments don’t care. This is 2023. Uttar Pradesh, India, where cybercrime rocks!.

But the fight against cyber crime must go on, in order to protect our citizens, our businesses and our society. We will leverage technology to support all efforts to achieve this objective.