Hoax bomb threat: Home Secretary meets BCAS, CISF chiefs to discuss issue
NEW DELHI: The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) met with the top officials of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) on Monday, to deal with the spate of hoax bomb threats to the airlines last week.
Officials briefed the Home Secretary Govind Mohan about the hoax bomb threats to airlines, leading to diversions, cancellations and passenger inconvenience, as these bore a huge cost to the aviation sector, sources said.
They said during the briefing, the top officials of the two agencies, responsible for providing security to the airlines and airports, noted that most of such threats originated from abroad and ‘VPN chaining’ is suspected to make it “almost impossible’ for Indian agencies to trace the exact location of their origin.
The sources said BCAS Director General (DG) Zulfiquar Hasan and Chief of the CISF Rajwinder Singh Bhatti met the Home Secretary at his office at North Block here.
A senior official, while refusing to divulge the details of the meeting, said, Hasan and Bhatti briefed Mohan about the incidents of bomb threats and the steps taken to check such incidents.
As many as 25 flights of Indian airlines received bomb threats on Sunday taking such incidents to around 100 over the past seven days affecting the schedule of over 90 domestic and international flights.
The BCAS coordinates, monitors, inspects and trains personnel in civil aviation security matters thereby maximising the effectiveness of aviation security and minimising acts of unlawful interference with civil aviation operations.
The CISF guards 68 civilian airports in the country by deploying about 40,000 personnel who provide counterterror security cover, frisk passengers and screen luggage.
Meanwhile, sources said, the agencies have not been able to trace the actual Internet Protocol (IP) address from which the threats were issued. More to it, cyber security experts, who are involved in the digital probe, have also found that the accused are not the same in all cases.
“In one instance, a note was found on a Udaipur-Mumbai flight written on tissue paper. In other cases, threats were generated digitally. In some instances, threats were made through social media, while in others, emails were sent,” a source said.
According to the initial probe, the IP addresses were initially traced to European countries, “but VPN chaining was suspected to have been used, making further tracing nearly impossible”, the sources said, adding that they are trying to obtain details from VPN companies and their response is awaited.
They said that had it been a normal VPN, the agencies would have traced it very easily, but in the present case, VPN chaining has been used in which data “is routed through a primary VPN server, which decrypts and re-encrypts the data before sending it to a secondary VPN server” for an additional layer of encryption and decryption.