A textile manufacturing company having its office at Worli, has lodged a complaint with the police stating that unknown persons had hacked the data from the company's server and had encrypted the said data. The hacker had demanded extortion in bitcoin, in order to restore the data. Statistics of the Mumbai police show that last year, the city police had registered 32 cases of hacking, 20 cases of data theft and 07 cases of crypto-currency fraud.
According to the police, the 43-year-old complainant in the case, works as the accountant with the textile company. On January 19, one of the employees of the company, received a message on her office laptop which read, "Encrypted by loki locker. All your files have been encrypted due to a security problem."
The message also contained two email addresses and further informed to contact on those email addresses if the services wanted to be resumed. The said employee then informed about the message to an official working with the IT department of the company. The company officials then realised that someone hacked into the server of the company.
"As per the complainant, the hackers had demanded 1350 USD in the form of bitcoins in order to restore the data. The company official the lodged a complaint with the police in this regard on Sunday. We have registered a case under section 385 (putting person in fear of injury in order to commit extortion) of the Indian Penal Code and sections 43 (penalty and compensation for damage to computer, computer system, etc) and 66 (computer related offences) of the Information Technology Act," said a police officer.
Earlier this month, the Airport police in Pune registered a threat and extortion case against an email sender for issuing mail threats to senior officials of a private finance company headquartered in Pune, stating he/she will delete the firm’s data by hacking into its database. The email sender demanded extortion of 11.63 crore coins of a cryptocurrency and threatened to delete the data if it wasn’t paid.
