Thousands Of Swiss Bank Account Details Posted On Darknet; Indians May Figure In List

In a shocking incident, a Geneva computer security agency was hacked and nearly 65,000 confidential documents were published on the darknet on Sunday, according to a report published in The Tribune de Geneve, a Swiss-French daily.

A large number of these documents pertain to private Swiss banks and their account-holders. While the exact number or nature of these bank accounts is not known, it is believed that hackers may have asked for ransom money to keep the details under wraps.

Many Indian businessmen and rich politicians are understood to have secret accounts in private Swiss banks, which have a reputation to keep the identity of their clients secret.

It will be interesting to see whether these banks or the clients pay the ransom or will it trigger news hounds to dig information from the Darknet and expose economic offenders.

According to another Swiss daily Le Temps, the computer security company have had clients such as public institutions like the State Chancellery of Geneva, and some of the most prestigious private banks in Switzerland. Added to this are multinationals as well as law firms and trustees.

These documents would have been auctioned on the darknet, Sunday morning, by a group of hackers using the ransomware of Russian origin LockBit3.0. They were then posted online at the end of the afternoon, said the news report.

Among the documents made public would be in particular identity documents, e-mail addresses and private telephone numbers, contracts, residence permits, extracts from criminal records, certificates of prosecution, or bank details of customers.

India has raised the issue of global economic offenders and secret bank accounts at various international forums.

Incidentally, Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his election campaign in 2014 had promised to bring back all the black money stashed in Swiss banks and expose the offenders. However, there has been no apparent action on this front by his government after it came to power.