The State police have tracked the furtive online attempt in May to steal scholarship meant for poor students hailing from minority communities in Kerala to a gang of hackers based in Isthanpur in West Bengal.
Assistant Superintendent of Police, Kerala Police Cyber Cell, M. Iqbal told The Hindu that a team of officers from Kerala had raided a private residence in Isthanpur this week and arrested Babul Hussain, 26, amid stiff resistance from a gang of local people.
The officers produced the accused in front of a local magistrate on Thursday and procured a transfer warrant to shift him to Kerala for further investigation. The police have booked Hussain on the charges of conspiracy, impersonation, cheating and other relevant provisions of the IT Act.
In June, the Higher Education Department found that anonymous persons had hacked into its official website hosted by the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
It petitioned State Police Chief Loknath Behera for a detailed probe. Mr. Behera constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under Mr. Iqbal to investigate the case.
Mr. Iqbal and his team sifted through NIC logs for digital clues. They traced the pivot of the digital invasions to an IP address in Isthanpur. The police found that the hackers had sought to slyly supplant the bank account details of at least 400 students eligible for the minority scholarship with those they had generated under false identities.
Fictitious names
In some cases, they inserted fictitious names and addresses of non-existent students into the list of eligible candidates on the website.
However, the police said the attempt to steal student scholarship had not panned out as planned by the conspirators.
The cyber sleuths had broken through the amateurish efforts of the hackers to conceal their IP addresses to hide the provenance of the hacking attempts.
Officers said Hussain, the prime accused, worked in a temporary clerical post in a school in West Bengal. He knew about various government benefits for students and could have exploited more schemes for financial gain. The fraud was just the tip of the iceberg, and more arrests were in the offing. S. Sreejith, IG, supervised the probe.
