- Police to press Google over security lapses
Reuters is the first to report that Google itself figures in the investigation. NEW DELHI, Sept 15 – Indian police will question Google over a lack of safeguards after smashing a criminal network that set up and managed more than 500,000 fake Gmail accounts to send hoax bomb threats to government offices, a police official told Reuters on Tuesday.
Police in the western state of Gujarat broke up an email network this week that they described as sending “inter-state” bomb threats and arrested two individuals, uncovering 513,847 Gmail IDs and passwords being used since 2022. The scale of fake Gmail accounts in use is unprecedented, Vivek Bheda, a senior cybercrime official of the Gujarat police, told Reuters. “We will write to Google, ask them to make some policy changes so cannot be bypassed,” Bheda said, adding that police planned to formally designate Google as a subjectof the investigation soon. It also threatened countries cooperating with India during the summit, police said in a statement. The threats proved false, Bheda said, adding that one of those arrested was in contact with a buyer in Bangladesh who purchased batches of the accounts and paid partly in cryptocurrency to send the fake emails.
The Gujarat investigation began after a bomb threat email received by the state government on September 10, days ahead of the recent New Delhi summit of the BRICS grouping.
