The Insikt Group said it also observed about 5 megabytes of data transferred in a similar fashion from the police department of Madhya Pradesh state, whose chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, called for a boycott of Chinese products after June 2020 border clashes with India.
The company's own investigation of the hack classified the incident as "non-serious alerts and false alarms," he said. Most of the data was in the "DNS queries category, which got blocked/dropped at our defense infrastructure," he said in an emailed comment. Rajeev Batra, chief information officer for Bennett Coleman, said the company also received information on the suspected hack from CERT-In, the government agency that deals with cybersecurity threats, and responded to it several weeks ago. Insikt said it could not identify the content of that data, but noted that the company frequently publishes reports on China-India tensions, and that the hack was likely motivated by "wanting access to journalists and their sources as well as pre-publication content of potentially damaging articles."
It said is observed approximately 500 megabytes of data being extracted from the network of the privately owned Mumbai company, whose publications include The Times of India. media company in "sustained and substantial network communications" with two Winnti servers between February and August. The Insikt Group said it detected four IP addresses assigned to the Bennett Coleman And Co. "As of early August 2021, Recorded Future data shows a 261% increase in the number of suspected state-sponsored Chinese cyber operations targeting Indian organizations and companies already in 2021 compared to 2020," the organization said in a report.
In its report, the Insikt Group suggested the cyberattack could be related to those border tensions. The allegation has the possibility of increasing friction between the two regional giants, whose relations have already been seriously strained by a border dispute that has led to clashes this year and last year. The Insikt Group, the threat research division of Massachusetts-based Recorded Future, said the hacking group, given the temporary name TAG-28, made use of Winnti malware, which it said is exclusively shared among several Chinese state-sponsored activity groups.Ĭhinese authorities have consistently denied any form of state-sponsored hacking and said China itself is a major target of cyberattacks. A U.S.-based private cybersecurity company said Wednesday it has uncovered evidence that an Indian media conglomerate, a police department and the agency responsible for the country's national identification database have been hacked, likely by a state-sponsored Chinese group.
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