Mira Bhayandar: 3 Former IT Firm Employees Accused Of Hacking Company System, Stealing Sensitive Client Data; Case Registered

Mira Bhayandar: The Naya Nagar police has registered an offence against three former employees for allegedly hacking into the system of a Mira Road-based IT management solution and software development company and stealing valuable client data.

In his complaint to the police, the owner -Raj Singh said that his company had developed a Google-certified application which not only enabled mobile phone retailers in managing their financed customers but also provided an option to instantly lock the screen if the equated monthly instalments (EMI) were not paid on time.

In 2021, Singh employed the three suspects including-Chandresh Bhartiya as technical head, Manoj Maurya and Himanshu Singh as assistant technicians. As a part of the company’s expansion plan, a branch was established in Varanasi headed by Bhartiya with Maurya and Singh as assistant technicians.

To ensure uninterrupted operations, Singh gave them passwords for complete access to the company’s server. The trio gradually left the company in 2023.

However, Singh was shocked when the system automatically went into hard reset (format) mode in July, 2023 leading to the deletion of sensitive data including-photos, videos, contact list, bank details, important documents from the mobile phones of nearly 3.50 lakh users.

The incident significantly impacted the firm which had to compensate the losses by reimbursing more than Rs 1.51 crore. The firm installed a new software to detect any type of fresh intrusions, following which some internal protocol (IP) addresses were traced and the suspected role of the former employees in the data theft came to light.

Singh registered a complaint with the cyber cell and the Naya Nagar police, following which an offence under the relevant sections of the IPC and the Information Technology Act was registered against the trio who are yet to be arrested. Further investigations were underway.