Context: American cybersecurity firm SentinelOne has released a report on ModifiedElephant.
It is a hacking group that allegedly planted incriminating evidence on the personal devices of Indian journalists, human rights activists, human rights defenders, academics and lawyers.
Key takeaways from the report
According to the report, ModifiedElephant maliciously targeted specific groups and individuals, including the activists arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case of 2018.
It called the incident ‘one of the most serious cases of evidence tampering’ that the firm had ever encountered.
ModifiedElephant operators have been infecting their targets using spear phishing emails with malicious file attachments over the last decade, with their techniques getting more sophisticated over time.
Spear phishing refers to the practice of sending emails to targets that look like they are coming from a trusted source to either reveal important information or install different kinds of malware on their computer systems.