BENGALURU: After 40 schools in the city received bomb threat emails on Friday morning, police said the messages were sent using an offshore platform called AtomicMail.io, which deletes all user data, including sender details, after just seven days. Officials told TNIE that they are also looking into whether the emails were sent directly through such services or if they were triggered by “automated bots”, some of which are reportedly sold freely on Telegram.
Since 2023, the services used in such threats have changed from Beeble to a Tor-based dark web mailer and now to AtomicMail, and they all don’t log IP addresses, keep no user records, and operate under jurisdictions that either reject legal cooperation or require treaties that India doesn’t have.
According to officials, AtomicMail is part of a growing network of offshore platforms designed for “privacy-first” communication but misused for hoaxes, fraud, and cyber threats.
This isn’t the first instance of Bengaluru schools receiving such threats. Between 2022 and 2024, Bengaluru reported 133 such cases. In 2023, most emails were sent through Beeble.
Later, threat actors moved to Tor-based dark web services and, more recently, to AtomicMail, which has seen a rise in abuse cases globally due to its short data retention window and lack of oversight.