Hackers Planted Files to Frame Indian Priest Who Died in Custody

Swamy didn't touch the files himself. After his devices were seized by the police, they used those files to charge him with terrorism and inciting a riot in which two people died.

The firm notes that all of the findings are similar to the cases of evidence fabrication that were carried out by the same hackers. The report says that the attacker has been caught red-handed again.

On Swamy's computer, the hackers seem to have begun a clean-up operation in which they deleted files that showed their access to his machine. The attempt at anti-forensics was both unique and extremely suspicious.

According to Tom Hegel, a researcher for security firm Sentinel One, the hackers wanted to plant fake evidence in order to incriminate Swamy. They published their own findings on the hacking cases. Hegel believes that the deletion of his fingerprints suggests that the hackers knew that the devices were going to be seized. Hegel believes that the police unit and the attackers colluded at that time.

Several signs point to the fact that the hackers who targeted members of the Bhima Koregaon 16 may have been aided and abetted by the police who arrested many of them. In some cases months before they were arrested, an official in thePune City Police may have added his own email address and phone number to several of the defendants' hacked email accounts. There is a connection between the people who arrested the people and the people who planted the evidence.

In June and in response to the new findings, the officials of the city police refused to speak to WIRED.

Eleven of the 16 defendants are in jail. Four people have been released on bail and one has been placed under house arrest. Human rights organizations and the US State Department have spoken out against the imprisonment and death of Stan Swamy, the oldest of the defendants.

The hackers who wanted to frame him were not the first to target him. According to Hegel, the hackers who broke into Swamy's computer are part of a group called "Modified Elephant." The group's code and command-and-control server were analyzed by Hegel and GuerreroSaade in a report they published in February that linked the group to the targeting of hundreds of activists, journalists, and academics.

Hegel says that the links back to Modified Elephant are clear. The evidence we have so far supports the idea that the defendants have been framed. The authorities who condemned Stan Swamy to spend the last months of his life in a jail cell were in league with the people who framed him.