Stan Swamy was an Indian Catholic priest, a member of the Jesuit order, and a tribal rights activist for several decades. died in custody at a Mumbai hospital on July 5 last year, nearly nine months after he was arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
A new digital forensics report has found that multiple incriminating documents were planted on the laptop of activist Stan Swamy, who was named an accused in the Elgar Parishad case and who passed away last year in prison.
According to Arsenal Consulting, one of the documents was sent by a person named ‘SS’ assumed to be Father Stan Swamy to a ‘Vijayan Dada’ in 2017. The email asks Vijayan “to capture senior leaders of ruling BJP in the state and demand that the oppressive laws be done with.”
The latest Arsenal report said: “Arsenal has connected the same attacker to a significant malware infrastructure which we now know was deployed over the course of over six years to not only attack and compromise Fr Swamy’s computer during the aforementioned time span, but to attack his co-defendants in the Bhima Koregaon case and defendants in other high-profile Indian cases as well.
“The hacker had used malware called NetWire to gain access to Father Stan Swamy’s computer on October 19, 2014, for both invasive surveillance and ‘documentary delivery,” the report stated.
The report further mentions that the hacker made several attempts to erase their malicious activities, a day before Swamy’s computer was seized by the Pune police. The timing raises the question of whether the hacker had prior knowledge of the impending police action.
It also said that the same hacker had targeted activist Rona Wilson and lawyer Surendra Gadling both accused in the Elgar-Parishad case. The hacker, as per the report, used the same command, control servers and NetWire configurations, including the hacker’s passwords.
