Staff Reporter :Members of Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police have arrested two members of an international email hacker’s gang, including a foreigner, from city’s Bashundhara residential area. The foreigner was identified as Kingsle Living Stone, a citizen of Nigeria. Another one was identified as Sonia Sharmin, a national of Bangladesh. Both of them are active members of an international email hacker’s gang, police said. Acting on tip-off, the team of CTTC unit conducted a drive in a house at Bashundhara residential area and arrested Kingsle and Sonia while they were preparing to hack email accounts of some important persons at about 9:00pm on Wednesday.The Police, however, disclosed the matter in a press conference at DMP media centre on Thursday. “The CTTC unit nabbed the criminals from Bashundhara residential area on Wednesday night. Of the arrestees, Sonia was also caught earlier for cheating people,” Chief of CTTC unit Monirul Islam said.He said the hackers’ main target was to take away cash and other valuables by hacking email accounts of people. In primary interrogation the arrestees confessed to the police that they are involved with email hackings for many years and hacked numerous email accounts till the date. A case was filed with Vatara Police Station in this connection, he added.Meanwhile, police sources said cyber and technology related crimes are on the increase and the current trends indicate that it will be a significant issue in Bangladesh within a very short time. Cybercrime has already become a going concern in both private as well as public sectors as both sectors have done a revolution with the use of technical enhancement in the last decade. Several companies have lost huge confidential information which ultimately caused a large amount of financial lose due to unauthorized intervention to the system.It has already been identified that especially financial institutions are most vulnerable to cybercrime and its latest example was hacking of Bangladesh Bank account for multi-million dollar heist, police sources said. Apart from hacking email IDs, government websites or online bank accounts, the organized criminals are extorting money from people by hacking their facebook accounts. Officials concerned said the Cyber Safety Programme wing of the ICT Ministry received over 2,000 complaints in January and February, of which incidents of facebook ID hacking were more than 1,200 in February. Not only that, a good number of people use fake IDs on facebook and Twitter to conduct criminal activities and collect members for militant outfits, the ICT Ministry officials said.
