Police in India Planted False and Incriminating Files on Activists' Computers to Arrest Them

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Photo by Abhishek Koli on Unsplash

New clues discovered by SentinelOne researchers on a case in India connect law enforcement to a campaign that used identification and hacking tools to plant false, incriminating files on targets’ computers that they then used as grounds to arrest and jail them.

SentinelOne’s new findings link the Pune City Police to the long-running hacking campaign, which the company has called Modified Elephant, and center on two particular targets of the campaign: Rona Wilson and Varvara Rao. Both men are activists and human rights defenders who were jailed in 2018.

Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a security researcher at SentinelOne who, along with fellow researcher Tom Hegel, will present findings at the Black Hat security conference in August, said, “This is beyond ethically compromised. It is beyond callous. So we’re trying to put as m…