Tek Fog

Tek Fog is a mobile phone software application reportedly used by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the right-wing Hindu nationalist party that has been the ruling party of India since 2014. The purpose of the software is to infiltrate social media platforms and promote favourable viewpoints through misinformation targeting users perceived to be BJP party opponents. Tek Fog also managed a huge database of Indian citizens which included specific data regarding their occupation, religion, age, gender, etc., which was then used to deliver targeted insults and criticism. A key function of the software is to manipulate trending features on Twitter and Facebook by automatically sharing or retweeting posts, and promoting existing hashtags to trending levels. Le Monde commented that it is perhaps the most elaborate online political manipulation operation ever discovered.

Alerted by a disgruntled employee-turned-whistleblower, the independent Indian news publication The Wire conducted a two-year investigation and published its findings in January 2022, reporting that the Tek Fog application was used "to artificially inflate the popularity of the Bharatiya Janata Party, harass its critics and manipulate public perceptions at scale across major social media platforms" and to "amplify right-wing propaganda".

The Wire investigation implicated the BJP, along with the private companies Persistent Systems and Mohalla Tech (which operates a service called ShareChat), in the deployment of the app. The BJP's youth wing (BJYM) members are said to have supervised the operators, giving them ideological directions. It reported that Mohalla Tech was involved in the management of Tek Fog, and that the whistleblower was paid via Mohalla Tech as their assigned client, and ShareChat was widely exploited by Tek Fog. The investigation found that Persistent Systems was involved in the production and management of Tek Fog. An internal source within Persistent Systems confirmed the involvement of the company, with 17,000 files connected to Tek Fog developed by Persistent Systems.

Opposition parties denounced the app as a national security threat and demanded a probe. The ruling BJP and the prime minister Narendra Modi have not responded to The Wire report. BJP youth wing functionary Devang Dave, who is said to have supervised the operation, denied the party's involvement. MP Derek O'Brien has called for a meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs to discuss the app. Congress urged the Supreme Court to ask its expert panel to investigate the app. The Editors Guild of India condemned "the online harassment of women journalists, which includes targeted and organised online trolling as well as threats of sexual abuse" and demanded steps to break up and dismantle the "misogynistic and abusive digital eco-system" of Tek Fog. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in its response to the parliamentary committee, said that it had been unable to find the app in the mobile app stores.

The Wire investigation

An investigation by The Wire found that Tek Fog was used by the information technology cell of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP IT Cell) as part of its social media political propaganda campaign. In 2022, The Wire reported that the Tek Fog app was used by BJP "to artificially inflate the popularity of the party, harass its critics and manipulate public perceptions at scale across major social media platforms."

Tek Fog was used to manage inauthentic accounts en masse across multiple social media platforms. Tek Fog was able to hack contact lists of inactive WhatsApp accounts and, impersonating the inactive WhatsApp account owner, send propaganda messages to the user's contacts.

The Wire's report described the app as being capable of several actions. Some of the capabilities reportedly incorporated into the app are listed below:

Hijacking social media trends

The Tek Fog app is able to hijack the trending section of social media sites, Twitter and Facebook. Tek Fog's operators shared and forwarded social media messages to individuals or groups automatically. This was used to artificially inflate the popularity of "extremist narratives and political campaigns".

Phishing and capturing inactive WhatsApp accounts

Tek Fog enabled the bulk-hacking of inactive WhatsApp accounts, and the mass-message the accounts' contacts with propaganda messages, with the messages sent appearing to recipieints to be the owner of the inactive WhatsApp account. Inactive WhatsApp accounts are live accounts which not in use by their owners, either because WhatsApp was uninstalled, or the user's phone was reset.

The Tek Fog app worked by targeting active WhatsApp accounts and sending those accounts a media file (video or image) from an unknown number. The media file contained spyware that is activated after it is downloaded, at which point it renders the phone vulnerable to remote surveillance. The hacker is then able to monitor the activity status of that device. If the phone became inactive due to app-uninstallation or phone reset, the hacker could seize control of the target account and use it to send messages remotely, without the owner's knowledge.

Only inactive WhatsApp accounts were targeted, since owners of active WhatsApp accounts would inevitably learn of fraudulent messages being sent to their contacts remotely.

According to The Wire, while verifying this activity, the whistleblower with access to Tek Fog was able to hack and take control of a test WhatsApp account used by its reporters "within minutes." The application then sent a message to all the frequent contacts of the captured account.

Database of citizens' private information

Tek Fog had an extensive, dynamic cloud database containing private citizens' personal information, such as "occupation, religion, language, age, gender, political inclination and even physical attributes like skin tone and breast size." The Wire received screenshots that showed these parameters. The Wire verified the existence of this database by monitoring harassment messages that were directed with a surprising amount of detail at female journalists who were among the targeted groups. The database could automatically generate messages, which were mostly hateful or abusive in nature, by either connecting to Google Sheets or automatically generating phrases.

Modification of existing news articles for fake news

Tek Fog functionality included the ability to modify existing news articles to change their links and keywords. The changed link would then lead the reader to a webpage that looked similar to the original website but with fake content replacing the original author's article. The text modification capabilities were powered by artificial intelligence models.

Automated messaging

Tek Fog was also designed to send bulk automated-messages from fraudulent accounts which primarily contained political propaganda and abusive messages.

Tek Fog users would use the app to send automated hate messages targeting Muslims and female journalists whose work diverged from the right-wing Hindutva BJP narrative. The researchers discovered that 18% of the 4.6 million replies received by 280 prominent women journalists on Twitter, posted over a five-month period, were by accounts operated through Tek Fog.

Organisations involved

Tek Fog's users were said to be a part of a political-corporate nexus that linked large technology players and platforms with the BJP political party. This nexus included:

• Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), the youth wing of Bharatiya Janata Party. Yuva Morcha, a former National Social Media and IT Head of Bharatiya Janata who currently worked as the election manager of BJP in Maharashtra, was the immediate supervisor of the person who was the source in The Wire investigation. BJYM members supervised the operators and gave them ideological direction. The Wire verified their involvement using the codes sent through their official email ID. These codes helped to identify the secure server hosting Tek Fog and external websites connecting to the Tek Fog server.
• Persistent Systems is an Indian-American technology services company involved in development and maintenance. A current employee of the company provided documents related to the development of the application from the company's internal servers. They showed around 17,000 assets found when searching the term "Tek Fog."
• ShareChat is a social media platform created by Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd. Tek Fog users also used ShareChat "to test and curate fake news, political propaganda and hate speech before automating it to other popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp". The involvement of ShareChat was verified through 14 accounts controlled by Tek Fog. These 14 accounts created posts on ShareChat, Twitter and Facebook in April 2020. The Wire found that 90% of the social media posts from these accounts were first uploaded on ShareChat, after which they were published on Twitter or Facebook.

Victims

The Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ) released a statement condemning the app stating that women journalists were "prime targets of the app" and noting that The Wire investigation listed several women journalists who received up to one million abusive tweets between January and May 2021, including Rana Ayyub, Barkha Dutt, Nidhi Razdan, Rohini Singh, Swati Chaturvedi, Sagarika Ghose, Manisha Pande, Faye D'Souza, Arfa Khanum Sherwani and Smita Prakash.

On 9 January, journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani released a list of prominent women from several religions including Hinduism who were targeted and harassed by hackers using Tek Fog.

Reactions

The Editors Guild of India, a national non-profit organisation of journalists, said that The Wire investigation "laid bare an extensive and well funded network built around an app, Tek Fog, which steals unused WhatsApp accounts to send out toxic messages to targeted journalists", highlighting the abuse received by women journalists and noting that "the purpose of these deeply hurtful messages was to instil fear in them". The Editors Guild condemned "the continuing online harassment of women journalists, which includes targeted and organised online trolling as well as threats of sexual abuse", and demanded "urgent steps to break and dismantle this misogynistic and abusive digital eco-system".

The Congress party called Tek Fog, "a poisonous weapon of the BJP's propaganda machinery, which is harmful to the country". The Minister of State for Home in the Maharashtra government, Satej Patil, questioned the silence of the Government of India and Information and Technology ministry over the Tek Fog expose. Patil demanded that the Union government should take cognisance of the issue. He made a public appeal to the victims from Mumbai targeted by Tek Fog app to register a police complaint, after which Maharashtra Police and Cyber Crime Investigation Cell will investigate the case.

Journalist Zarrar Khuhro wrote in Dawn that Tek Fog "was used in many underhanded ways to promote the hateful Hindutva ideology, and in particular to abuse and cow activists, journalists and opposition politicians".

Devang Dave, head of BJYM IT Cell, denied that he or anyone from his organisation knew about such an app. Persistent Systems and Mohalla Tech denied any involvement with each other or with Tek Fog.

Anand Venkatnarayanan, an Indian internet security researcher and author of a book on information warfare, said that Tek Fog is a military-grade psychological operations weapon. So far, the capabilities that are part of Tek Fog had only been accessible to state actors who used them against the population in enemy countries. He said, "Putting such a weapon in the hands of non-state actors affiliated to a political party contesting for mind space of citizens in a democracy has never been done before."

Investigation by Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs

On 12 January 2022, The Hindu reported that Anand Sharma, the head of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, wrote to the Ministry of Home Affairs of the Government of India seeking a response on questions surrounding Tek Fog. They directed the Ministry to co-ordinate with other ministries, and provide information on the app and its use by 20 January 2022.

The investigation was initiated after several calls for the Standing Committee to investigate Tek Fog. Rajya Sabha MP Derek O'Brien (of the Trinamool Congress), a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, previously wrote to Anand Sharma, the head of the committee, to discuss the secret app "Tek Fog" that "has serious ramifications and could jeopardise national security." O'Birne wrote, "This application is capable of penetrating encrypted messaging platforms and secure social media conversations, in order to heavily manipulate and exploit narratives on said platforms." Chairman Sharma was reported to have taken note of the matter, stating that it may be discussed in the next meeting of the Parliamentary Panel on Home Affairs. On 10 January, O'Brien wrote a second letter to convene a meeting to discuss Tek Fog. He wrote that the app provided an ability to hijack the WhatsApp accounts of citizens using spyware and use their inactive contacts of the hijacked number, which were uploaded to a database, to send mass messages. The letter also pointed out that this hacking technique was formerly used by the Pegasus spyware before the NSO Group developed an even more sophisticated zero-click hijacking method. The application, per O'Brien, could send automated messages, spread misinformation, fake news and mislead citizens.

On 12 January, Congress leader and leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury also wrote to the chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, Anand Sharma, asking the committee discuss the "violative software application Tek Fog" in their next meeting.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee asked the Union Home Ministry to provide information about the Tek Fog app. On 12 February, responding to the request, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar stated, "The ministry has searched for the app on all prominent app stores and APK stores and could not find so called app in any of these online stores."

Call for Supreme Court intervention

Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate held a press conference on the issue in which she "urged the Supreme Court to look into this and to punish, in no uncertain terms, the people who are behind this because no one should have the right or the freedom to erode India's democracy." Congress wanted the Supreme Court to get the issue examined by the expert panel that was looking into the alleged use of the Pegasus spyware on Indian citizens. Shrinate said that the app "targets Indian citizens and hurts the very foundation of our democracy." Congress leader Rahul Gandhi called the app one of several "factories of hate" set up by the BJP.

The Editors Guild of India and Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ), in their statements, also called for a Supreme Court inquiry.

Retraction

On 23 October 2022, The wire quietly took down its Tek Fog story due to multiple charges of misinformation and forgery on another investigation done by the same tech journalists.

See also

• Pegasus Project revelations in India

Further reading

• Part 1: "Tek Fog: An App With BJP Footprints for Cyber Troops to Automate Hate, Manipulate Trends". The Wire. 6 January 2022. Archived from the original on 6 January 2022.
  • "Explainer: Here's What the Tek Fog App Can Do, and Why You Should Care". The Wire. 7 January 2022. Archived from the original on 7 January 2022.
• Part 2: "Tek Fog: Morphing URLs to Make Real News Fake, 'Hijacking' WhatsApp to Drive BJP Propaganda". The Wire. 10 January 2022. Archived from the original on 10 January 2022.
• Part 3: "Tek Fog in Action: Targeting Women Journalists, Pushing Communal Narrative on COVID, Delhi Violence". The Wire. 14 January 2022. Archived from the original on 3 June 2022.

External links

• Prime Time With Ravish Kumar: Tek Fog App से सावधान! आपके बच्चों को दंगाई बना देगा [Prime Time With Ravish Kumar: Beware of Tek Fog App! [It] will turn your kids into rioters] (in हिन्दी). NDTV. 11 January 2022.
• "NL Interview: Tek Fog exposé writers on BJP IT cell and what goes behind automated trolling". Newslaundry. 21 January 2022.