Two top police officers are accused of giving thieves personal information about citizens that they got from a secret government database.
learned that two high-level anti-terror police officers in Bangladesh are accused of keeping secret and selling private information about citizens to crooks on Telegram.
A letter signed by a top Bangladeshi intelligence official that saw says that the data that was sold included cell phone call records, national identity details of citizens, and other “classified secret information.”
Brigadier General Mohammad Baker wrote the letter on April 28. He is in charge of Bangladesh’s National Telecommunications Monitoring Center (NTMC), which listens in on people’s phone calls. In an interview with Baker acknowledged that the letter and what it said were real.
In an online chat, Baker said, “Departmental investigations are still going on in both cases.” He also said that the Bangladeshi Ministry of Home Affairs had told the affected police forces to “take necessary action against those officers.”
The letter was first written in Bengali and was sent to the senior secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs Public Security Division. It says that two police officers hacked into private citizens’ Telegram accounts and shared “extremely sensitive information” with other people in exchange for money.
The letter says that the police officers were caught after looking at logs of the NTMC’s systems to see how often the two of them used them.
The letter gives away the names of the leaders. One of the suspects is a police officer who works for the Anti-Terrorism Unit (ATU). The other person works as an assistant police supervisor deputy at the Rapid Action Battalion, or RAB 6. This is a controversial paramilitary unit that the U.S. government banned in 2021 because of claims that it is responsible for hundreds of disappearances and killings that did not follow the law. The two people who were accused aren’t being named because it’s not clear if they have been charged in the country’s court system.
The Ministry of Home Affairs in Bangladesh set up the NTMC as a government intelligence body. The main job of the agency is to keep an eye on all phone and internet data and listen in on conversations in order to find and stop threats to national security.
Human Rights Watch and Freedom House are two groups that have said that the NTMC doesn’t have enough protections against misuse of both free speech and privacy. Over the years, NTMC bought high-tech equipment from companies in Israel and other Western countries, even though Bangladesh does not officially recognize those countries. This equipment was used to spy on a lot of people, mostly members of the opposition party, media, activists, and people in civil society.
The NTMC’s job is to run the National Intelligence Platform (NIP), which is an internal government website that stores secret information about citizens. This includes details about their national IDs, cell phone registration and data records, crime profiles, and other things.
A number of law enforcement and intelligence organizations have accounts on the NTMC’s NIP portal.
According to NTMC’s own study, the agents used the NIP platform more often than other users and got information that wasn’t useful to them.
“Given the situation, such pointless access and illegal handover of highly sensitive classified data should be looked into to find out who is responsible, and we also ask that those responsible be held accountable,” the letter said.
Baker about the amount of Telegram channels. Baker said there were several, and one of them was called BD CYBER GANG.
Baker told that it looks like the two spies sent the data to the leader of at least one Telegram group, who then tried to sell it.
Baker said that the two agents were told about the probe.
Because of the probe, all NIP users from ATU and RAB 6 have been blocked “until the officials involved are identified and the right steps are taken,” as stated in the letter.
Baker stated that access had been blocked and said that agents could get any information they needed for investigations through Police and RAB HQ.
Multiple requests for feedback were made to the Bangladeshi Ministry of Home Affairs and ATU, but no one responded. A person at RAB 6 who only gave their name as a “operations officer” told that the agency had nothing to say.
A security researcher found that the NTMC was spreading private data about people on an unprotected computer last year. Wired says that the leaked information included real names, phone numbers, email addresses, places, and test scores. Last year, private information about Bangladeshi citizens was leaked by the Office of the Registrar General, Birth & Death Registration. Reported this at the time.
Virus Hunter Viktor Markopoulos, who works at Bitcrack Cyber Security, found both leaks.
Those cases of data leaks were serious, but the one involving the ATU and RAB 6 agents could be even worse because the agents are said to have sold information online to try to make money off of having access to private, secret information.
Also Read: Users Can Now Change Their Telegram Accounts From Personal to Business Ones
A government source told that there are still officials who are willing to sell people’s data, even though the event is still being looked into.
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