Sumit Gupta: For whom the BellTrox

Sumit Gupta, founder of BellTrox InfoTech Services, would exhort young recruits to hack into servers of targeted entities in return for more money, former employees of the Delhi-based company told ET. BellTrox was cited as a spy-for-hire firm by an internet watchdog group investigating an international espionage network.

Gupta would challenge the recruits to breach firewalls and explore loopholes in systems they were hired to penetrate, said sources who worked for the company founded by Gupta in 2013.

“The incentives were always project based. The more information (we) gathered, the more money we were paid,” said a former employee, who now works for an information security company that offers ethical hacking services to businesses. “We were never told who the clients were,” the person said.