HYDERABAD: Wearing a black tucked in shirt, neatly-combed hair and a clean-shaven face, Ishaan Sinha gives off the impression of a studious first-bencher in the college classroom.
It would be hard to believe if someone said that Sinha dabbles in the darknet on a daily basis, that he ‘scammed’ two police officials (of course, with their due permission) and that he tried to ‘recruit Jihadis’, just to prove a point.
This indeed happened on Tuesday when cybercrime investigative expert Ishaan Sinha, who has worked with several governmental investigative agencies such as RAW and NIA was demonstrating how darknet is used by criminals. During the demonstration-cum-speech on the topic ‘Demystifying the Darknet’, Sinha asked for the phone numbers of two women police officials present amid the audience. He then made a phone call to one of them from his own phone.
However, the number displayed on the officila’s phone was that of the police personnel sitting beside her. “This is how easy it is to duplicate identity,” Sinha said. “Using such spoof calls, easily available on darknet, these criminals cull out information.”
Sinha then went on to emphasise and dispel the popular myth that dabbling in the darknet or doing illegal transactions is untraceable. “Be very aware that we can track you. It might be hard, but not impossible.”
As per Sinha’s claim, darknet or deepweb constitutes 95 per cent of the total internet space.
“The internet that the ordinary user sees is only 4-5 per cent of it. The rest is all deepweb, which can only be accessed by downloading TOR browser. A part of the deepweb, with different kind of links used for illegal activities, is called the darknet.” Giving an insight into the kind of chat spaces that criminals use, Sinha introduced the dark website called hack.chat to the audience.
He logged into the website through the TOR browser, created an id and a chatroom. Sinha then urged people to copy the weblink and said, “Please open this link on your smartphones.” When people in the audience did, they were a part of chatroom.
“Let’s recruit Jihadis,” Sinha typed in, as more members of the audience joined in the chatroom.
An amused Sinha then said, “This is the kind of chatroom that master criminals use to formulate plans.”
Sinha also showed to the audience how certain websites had around 23 lakh compromised debit/credit cards on sale.