Delhi malls, hospitals get bomb threat emails: Why is tracking sender tough

Bombs threats, mostly hoax calls, to schools, hospitals, malls, and other public places have become increasingly frequent since last year. The latest threats also seem to mirror the previous incidents

Several malls and prominent hospitals in Delhi received bomb threats on Tuesday, triggering an urgent search investigation at the locations, officials said.

According to Delhi Fire Services (DFS), a hospital in Nangloi and another Primus Hospital called the officials at around 1 pm, informing about the bomb threats. Following the calls, fire tenders, bomb detection teams and police were rushed to the spots to check for any signs or explosives.

Earlier today, Chanakya Mall, Select CityWalk, Ambience Mall, DLF, Cine Polis, Pacific Mall also received similar threats, which read "The explosive will go off in a few hours."

The Delhi Police said that they have started sanitising the mall and are yet to find anything suspicious. “Our cyber teams are tracking the sender of the email. We got the information at 10 in the morning," they said.

 

New face of cybercrime: Rising bomb threat emails

Hoax threats to schools, hospitals, malls, and other public places have become increasingly frequent since last year. The latest threats also seem to mirror the previous incidents.

While police have traced some senders to pranksters, there are suspicions of serious cases involving organised teams behind the threats.
 

These threat emails, while mostly false alarms, are still significant safety challenges, highlighting the evolving nature of cyber crimes and the difficulties in addressing them.

One of the reasons why tracking the sender in such cases can be difficult, is due to the end-to-end encryption of the email service used.

In an earlier such incident, Delhi Police had noted the use of 'beeble.com', a Europe-based company, which offers end-to-end encrypted mailing services.

How does end-to-end encryption work?

End-to-end encryption - a digital privacy tool is offered by several tech platforms to ensure privacy and security for its users.

Tech giant Meta, which also offers end-to-end encryption on its services such as WhatsApp, claims that no one, not even the company itself, except the communicating persons have access to such chats. The feature allows the data to be encrypted at its origin and decrypted at its destination via technology that turns the message into a code. That way, anyone trying to read it in between, cannot understand what it means.

Through the 2021 IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, the Centre aims to address some of these challenges. However, experts and tech companies remain sceptical about the laws over the potential fears that they could be exploited for surveillance or censorship.