The All India Council for Technical Education, which is the statutory body for technical education in India, was added to the victim list of a hacker group based in Bangladesh. The group going by the name of Mysterious Team Bangladesh (MTB) claimed the alleged AICTE cyberattack on their Telegram channel, as shown below:
The Telegram post also had links to download stolen data from the AICTE cyberattack by MTB. The group leaked sensitive user information and concluded the post with ‘Expect Us…’ suggesting they may have other plans.
The stolen data consists of names of the departments under the AICTE, email addresses, and login credentials, including passwords of site administrators in plaintext. Not much is known about the details of the AICTE cyberattack regarding the supposedly failed ransom dialogue between the target and the culprit.
Researchers from the Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL) are continuously monitoring the malicious activities of the Mysterious Team Bangladesh.
The Cyber Express reached out to the AICTE for comments and has not received a response. Meanwhile, the website of the affected entity is fully accessible.
AICTE Cyberattack: Mysterious Team Bangladesh hacker group
The self-proclaimed hacktivist group boasted of protecting Bangladesh’s cyberspace. Their attacking of Israeli government websites was due to the nation’s killing of the Palestinian people, their blog post read.
The hacker group targeted Indian websites to avenge India’s alleged Islamophobic acts, the post said.
Among the last few posts made by the MTB group, the Dutch cyberattack was on top, published on February 3, 2023. The gang claimed that this attack was made in retaliation of certain Islamophobic acts.
As part of #OpSweden, the hackers called in supporters in a post dated January 26, 2023. The attacks were claimed to be in retaliation for a vitriolic Islamophobic campaign on January 25, 2023, organized by controversial far-right journalist Rasmus Paludan, a dual Danish-Swedish national with a history of carrying out similar acts.
The group launches DDoS attacks and defaces targeted websites, a CloudSEK report about MTB read.
The age range of the members of this hacker group was found to be between 20 to 25 years. They were traced to the Chittagong area of Bangladesh. Moreover, it was derived that most of the hackers were either still in college or were recent graduates.
They were previously a part of other smaller groups namely, Elite Force 71, Mysterious Team, Taskin Vau, and Bangladesh Cyber Anonymous Team. They were found reporting online content while pretending to be from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
MTB targets governments that are in the news for specific reasons. In one post MTB wrote, “No government can force women to wear the hijab #OpIran and no government can force women to remove the hijab #OpIndia.” The threat concluded with the words, ‘Oppressive governments should expect us.’
