Lawmakers Want Indian Firms Accused Of Hacking Americans Sanctioned
India-West News Desk
WASHINGTON, DC – A bipartisan group of three US lawmakers is calling on the Commerce Department to sanction three India-based companies accused of hacking and stealing data from thousands of Americans and US companies.
The companies named in the lawmakers’ request are Sunkissed Organic Farms Pvt. Ltd., formerly known as Appin Technology Pvt. Ltd., and its subsidiaries Adaptive Control Security Global Corporate Pvt. Ltd., formerly known as Appin Software Security Pvt. Ltd. or Appin Security Group, and ABP Holdings Pvt. Ltd., formerly known as KGW Appin Knowledge Solutions Pvt. Ltd. The other two are BellTroX Pvt. Ltd. and CyberRoot Pvt. Ltd.
Senators Ron Wyden, (D-OR) and Sheldon Whitehouse, (D-RI) and Rep. Pat Harrigan, (R-NC) have asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to place the companies on the department’s Entity List. That would cut off their access to American software, cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity tools.
The companies have also come under scrutiny for their efforts to challenge reporting on the alleged hacking operations through foreign courts, the lawmakers said.
They cited ongoing lawsuits involving US technology and media companies, including Google, Meta, Microsoft and The New Yorker, saying the actions sought to silence criticism and bury facts about the hacking campaigns.
The lawmakers said the companies at one point also used foreign courts to force a global takedown of a Reuters investigation into their operations.
The hacking campaigns, investigated by Reuters and The Citizen Lab, targeted private equity firms, pharmaceutical companies and more than 1,000 attorneys at major US law firms. According to the lawmakers, the operations were used to manipulate ongoing litigation.
The groups have also been linked to operations carried out at the behest of the Qatari government, the lawmakers said. Those targeted included opponents of Qatar’s World Cup bid and the family of a former Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
“Several India-based cyber-mercenary groups have spent more than fifteen years conducting targeted espionage against U.S. citizens, businesses and the lawyers representing them,” Wyden, Whitehouse and Harrigan wrote in their letter to Lutnick.
The lawmakers described the effort to suppress investigative reporting through foreign courts as an “aggressive campaign of global lawfare.” They said it allowed foreign entities to keep the American public in the dark about cyber threats to their own country and undermined the constitutional rights of US citizens.
