Hacked Balochistan Police Portal Used in Cyber-Espionage Campaigns

Cybersecurity specialists have reported uncovering a large-scale cyber-espionage campaign aimed at several of Pakistan's law enforcement bodies. According to the researchers, the attacks were carried out by groups believed to be linked to China and India between February 2024 and April 2026.

What happened

Among the compromised assets were servers hosting the Balochistan police's web applications, which are used to manage data on citizens and offenses, including criminal records. These systems became an entry point for the attackers, who gained access to infrastructure serving both law enforcement needs and the data of ordinary citizens.

Multiple attacker groups

What set the campaign apart was that the compromised portal was used by several different groups simultaneously or in succession, pointing to broad interest from various espionage outfits in Pakistan's law enforcement data. The very fact that actors linked to both China and India were involved shows that such resources hold value for multiple geopolitical players in the region.

Significance of the incident

The length of the campaign — more than two years — indicates that the breach went undetected for a long time, and that the attackers had the opportunity to harvest data from systems holding sensitive information about citizens and criminal cases. Incidents like this underscore the vulnerability of government digital infrastructure in countries with limited cybersecurity resources, and how such systems become an attractive target for espionage geared toward regional interests.

The researchers do not specify exactly what data was stolen or whether the attack is still ongoing, but disclosing the details of the campaign allows the affected organizations to take steps to remediate the consequences of the breach and strengthen the protection of such systems in the future.

Source: The Hacker News