Sriki hacked govt cell in 2019, stole Rs 11.5 crore?

By Hameed Ashraf | NT

Bengaluru: A hard disk marked ‘01’, has now come to light, which has explosive revelations on a massive hacking attempt in 2019, that resulted in several crores being stolen from the Karnataka government’s e-procurement cell. The disk, which belonged to enigmatic, 26-year-old hacker, Sriki, revealed that he and his gang were behind the 2019 robbery, after which the e-procurement cell filed a complaint with the cybercrime section of the Criminal Investigation Department. They reported a theft of `11.5 crore worth of deposits and said they were unable to stop a second theft of `7.37 crore. The discovery was made during the forensic analysis of six hard disks recovered from his laptops. Sriki’s Macbook was seized after his arrest in November 2020. Cybercrime police handed over the hard disks to Group Cyber ID Technology Pvt Ltd for analysis in early 2021. At the time, Sriki was accused of hacking two poker websites. In his statement to police, he did claim that he had tried to steal `46 crore from the e-procurement cell but only managed to get `11.5 crore.

The stolen money had to be stashed away. It was moved from the e-procurement cell to two accounts - one belonged to an NGO in Nagpur and the other to a private firm in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh.

The forensic analysis also uncovered hacking data for poker sites like PokerSaint, pppoker, Poker Baazi. Sriki’s gang had also hacked a Bitcoin exchange called Koinex and several other sites, including Zomato, the food supply service provider.

Sriki’s cloud server was also examined and it was found that he had as many as 76.13 lakh ‘public locations’ and ‘private keys’ for Bitcoins and some 26 e-wallets. Sources said these might have been obtained by hacking or through information exchanges on the dull web. One wallet, stored in the cloud, contained 31 Bitcoin and was shown to police by Sriki as his own.

The Bitcoin scandal has resulted in the BJP and Congress sparring over which party has connections to Sriki.