A pro-Islamist hacktivist organization, going by the name ‘Mysterious Team Bangladesh,’ has been responsible for a series of cyberattacks in India since June 2022. The group is believed to have ties to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Hefazat-e-Islam (HeI), and other Islamist-jihadist outfits in Bangladesh, allegedly funding and supporting their activities.
According to a report by the Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB, the group has carried out over 750 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and defaced 78 websites.
The main targets of these attacks have been logistics, government, and financial sector organizations in India and Israel, indicating the group’s religious and political motivations. Besides India and Israel, Mysterious Team Bangladesh has also targeted countries like Australia, Senegal, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Ethiopia.
The group is suspected to be of Bangladeshi origin and identifies itself as “protecting Our Bangladesh Cyberspace” in their Facebook intro. They maintain an active presence on social media platforms like Telegram and Twitter. On LinkedIn, the group claims to be supporting Palestine under their ongoing project “Operation Israel” since June 2022, condemning Israeli actions against Palestinian people and vowing to continue cyber-attacks until the alleged atrocities stop.
It appears that Mysterious Team Bangladesh gains access to web servers and administrative panels through exploiting known security flaws or weak passwords. Their first major attack against India occurred on June 22, 2022, with a focus on government resources, banks, and financial organizations.
The resurgence of hacktivism across the globe may be partly attributed to ongoing geopolitical conflicts, where hacktivists engage in various campaigns to promote their brand and gain recognition. Such activities allow them to monetize their information resources by selling advertising space.
Meanwhile, in Europe, a pro-Russian hacktivist collective known as NoName057(16) has been recently involved in disruptive DDoS attacks on Spanish and Italian websites. Unlike Mysterious Team Bangladesh, NoName057(16) follows a more strategic approach. They conduct thorough reconnaissance on their target websites, identifying the most resource-intensive components, such as pages with search functions or forms.
Subsequently, they craft specific web requests with placeholders for random data to exploit as attack vectors.
These findings highlight the evolving landscape of cyber threats and the use of hacktivism to advance ideological and political agendas. Governments and organizations worldwide must remain vigilant and strengthen their cybersecurity measures to safeguard against such cyberattacks.
