Breaking The Cyber Web

NOT ALL HEROES WEAR CAPES. SOME, LIKE SAKET MODI, WIELD KEYBOARDS TO GET THE BETTER OF HACKERS. HIS EFFORTS CAUGHT THE ATTENTION OF SILICON VALLEYS JOHN CHAMBERS, WHO HAS CHOSEN MODIS COMPANY, LUCIDEUS, AS HIS ENTRY POINT INTO INDIAS NASCENT CYBERSECURITY MARKET.

- Deepti Chaudhary

SINCE IT WAS AN OTA MESSAGE, it vanished before the man could respond. He didn’t think too much of it and went about his life. A few days later, when he was making dinner plans with his wife, he got another OTA message. This one asked if he wanted to make a reservation at his wife’s favourite restaurant. Assuming that his phone had been hacked, the puzzled and annoyed CFO changed his number and handset. And got an OTA message on the new phone, which complimented him on the new instrument.

The CFO was now scared, and filed a complaint with the police, who could do nothing about it. He changed his phone again. And again. And yet again. The messages simply did not stop. Worse, they began referring to secret sensitive business information that only the CFO had access to. This time, the CFO went to his company’s tech department, who called in Saket Modi, co-founder and chief executive of Lucideus, a cybersecurity firm.

Modi had been taking care of the cybersecurity for the health care company, so knew something about its functioning. It took him a couple of days to discover that the CFO’s connected devices—handsets, broadband modems, and smart TVs—had been hacked. His living room had become a public space, with the hackers aware of everything going on there, including top-secret, out-of-office company discussions.