Bomb scare: Dark web, VPNs keep cops on toes

With a brief pause to the bomb threat incidents and the blast near the historic Red Fort on November 10, several schools and colleges here received a series of threat emails twice in the past three days. Senior officers said the emails were sent using encrypted networks, making them hard to track the origin of bomb threat emails.

According to the police, only three such cases have been solved so far. Two cases were solved this year wherein two children were detained for sending bomb threats to schools in order to avoid exams, while one case was solved last year.

Investigators familiar with such cases mentioned that all bomb threats are being send using dark web and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which make it difficult for the investigators to trace the origin of such emails.

They further mentioned that the domain names of the emails received are mostly of other country which is made possible by using VPN.

A VPN is a service that creates a secure, encrypted connection over the Internet, masking the IP address and location of the user, protecting online activities from prying eyes.

Dark web is a part that isn’t indexed by standard search engines and requires specific software like Tor to access, offering a high degree of anonymity. It can be used for legitimate purposes like secure communication and also a known part of the Internet for illegal activities.

A police official investigating online threats likened the dark web to an onion, saying, “It’s like peeling layers - as you uncover one, another emerges. Decoding patterns is tough. It’s a maze that can lead nowhere, leaving you lost.”

“It’s more like a labyrinth (bhool bhulaiya), a complex network of paths and passages that are difficult to navigate. If you miss one turn, you are lost. Similarly things happen in tracing someone on the dark web or VPN,” the cop mentioned.

Moreover, cyber experts also believe that tracing the masked identities is a time-consuming process and there is no guarantee of results.

Jaspreet Bindra, a cyber expert, said the use of VPNs and the dark web to issue bomb threats makes attribution extremely difficult as these tools anonymise identities and route traffic through multiple global nodes.

However, technology can also offer solutions. Advanced AI-powered cyber forensics, metadata analysis and global cooperation among law enforcement agencies can help trace patterns and narrow down suspects, he added. He demanded that there is a need to regulate VPN and encrypted services without undermining their legitimate use.