by RV Raman
‘Ye…yes. Then how –’
‘There is only one way to find out.’ Dhruvi put the tape cartridges back into an envelope and stood up. ‘We go to the data centre. But before that, I’d like to know if you can recognize Manoj or Harry. You may have met them earlier.’
■
Half an hour later, they stood in front of a dim cell housing two men. One man was pacing the cell when they arrived, but the other sat calmly on the bunk. At the arrival of the visitors, the former retreated to the far end of the cell and stood facing the wall. He was clearly unwilling to show them his face.
‘Isn’t there another light?’ Gautam asked, peering into the cell. ‘It’s difficult to see in this gloom.’
The constable who had escorted them to the cell flipped a switch and a bright light came on, causing the men inside to flinch and shield their eyes.
‘Can you get him to turn around?’ Moin asked, pointing to the man who stood with his back to them.
No sooner had he spoken than the man spun around of his own accord. It was Harry. Slowly, his face reddened and ugly lines of fury contorted his features as he stared at Moin. After a long pause, he approached the bars and halted opposite Moin. He had eyes for no one else. Moin fell back a step at the virulent hatred in that intense stare.
‘Thomas!’ Harry hissed. ‘I recognize your voice. You were the one who spoke to me on the phone. You were the one who set me up. I recognize you, Moin Aziz!’ He turned to the other man and jabbed a finger at Moin through the bars. ‘This is the chief IT guy at MyMagicHat.’
‘Ah!’ Manoj sat up and smiled. ‘Is that so? How he got into this, I wonder.’
‘I know!’ Harry spat, spinning around to face Moin again, hatred and venom in his eyes. ‘His friend, Najeeb! The two of them set us up.’ An ugly snarl escaped his contorted lips. He was beside himself with fury. ‘You will not get away with this, Moin Aziz! You’re going to pay for it.’
■
Darshan, the head of the Bommasandra data centre, turned out to be a tall, spare man of fifty, with a serious face. Dhruvi couldn’t make out if the seriousness was natural or the consequence of an angry Puraria scion landing up unexpectedly in his office. As if Gautam coming in from the blue were not enough, he had brought a police Inspector along. That was quite enough to unsettle anyone in the Puraria empire. Darshan was trying hard, but unsuccessfully, to hide his anxiety.
Moin, Dhruvi noted instinctively, treated Darshan with deference and kept a respectful distance. When they went into a meeting room, he remained standing till Darshan had taken a seat. Only then did he sit.
‘Some problem, Mr Puraria?’ Darshan asked softly, once the door was closed. ‘I could have come to your office instead of you coming all the way to Bommasandra.’
The drive to Bommasandra had taken an hour.
‘I also wanted to visit the data centre, Darshan,’ Gautam said. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve been here.’
‘Of course! Delighted to have you here, Mr Puraria. What can I do for you?’
Darshan had recovered his poise, but remained cautious. His face fleetingly betrayed surprise as Gautam nodded to Dhruvi in response to Darshan’s question. Keeping her eyes on Darshan, Dhruvi opened the envelope and took out the three tape cartridges.
‘Do you recognize these, sir?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Darshan replied at once. There was no hesitation in his manner. ‘They look like our cartridges. Can I have a closer look?’
Dhruvi slid them across the table’s glass top and Darshan picked up each of the three in turn and studied them.
‘Yes, they were ours,’ he said at length. ‘We used them for backups.’
‘Were yours? Can you explain?’
‘We disposed of them last week.’ He put the cartridges back on the table and looked up as he continued in a slow, measured fashion. ‘We use a fair number of tape cartridges in the data centre, Inspector. The data on our servers is regularly backed up – some weekly, some more often. As securing data is of paramount importance, we have to use highly reliable cartridges that do not get corrupted.
‘However, cartridges have a finite life, after which their reliability declines. We replace them before they get to that point, lest our backups become unreliable. We, therefore, retire cartridges after a predetermined period of usage and replace them with new cartridges. These cartridges,’ he gestured to the ones on the table, ‘were retired last week.’
‘What do you do with the cartridges when you retire them?’ Dhruvi’s tone was benign, conversational.
‘We erase them and then dispose of them.’
She sensed Moin tense, but decided to lead Darshan away from the erasing of data.
‘How do you dispose of them?’ she asked.
‘Most are bought by recyclers, as our cartridges still have some useful life left. Those that are broken or damaged are scrapped as e-waste.’
‘Can you tell us what the fate of these three cartridges was, sir?’
‘I will have to check, but judging by their condition, I’d guess they were sold to recyclers.’
Dhruvi admired the patience with which Darshan was replying to her questions without once enquiring why she was asking them. Perhaps it was because Gautam was in the room. But it could be his nature too – he seemed like a polite, measured veteran. She was sure that he would have her answer his questions too, after she was finished with hers.
She decided to go directly to the crux of the matter.
‘Do you ensure that all cartridges are erased before they are disposed of, sir?’
‘Yes, we do.’ Darshan seemed unruffled.
‘How do you ensure it?’
‘The person entrusted with the job signs in a register, stating that he has erased them. We dispose of cartridges in batches and one person is responsible for erasing all the cartridges in a batch.’
‘Do you delete the files or wipe the entire tape?’
‘We wipe the entire tape. If we don’t, data can be retrieved from the tapes. We obviously want to avoid that risk, as all data we hold is confidential.’
‘Are you confident the procedure is being followed, sir?’
‘Ye…yes.’ The first signs of hesitation. ‘We do a sample check from random batches.’
‘Who does these sample checks?’
‘Someone other than the person who is responsible for erasing the batch.’
‘Why don’t you check all the cartridges? Why only a sample?’
‘Well, Inspector, you probably don’t know that wiping a tape clean of data takes a long time. Every inch of the tape has to be written over, you see. Checking if a tape has been completely wiped takes almost as much time as wiping it. We can’t possibly do a 100 per cent verification.’
‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate your patience. As you’ll see, the questions were important.’
As she was speaking, Dhruvi had retrieved all three cartridges. She now put two of them back into the envelope and held up the third in her left hand.
‘Could you please check how and when this cartridge was disposed of?’
Darshan spoke into the desk phone. A minute later, a man carrying a register hurried into the room. He took the cartridge from Dhruvi, studied the label and consulted his register.
‘Disposal Batch Number C-42/2016,’ he said. ‘It was sold to a recycler on Friday, 7 October.’
‘Who was the recycler?’
‘K. Manoj.’
‘Jayanagar?’
The man looked up in surprise and then turned the register around for Dhruvi to read the recycler’s details.
‘Thank you.’ Dhruvi nodded to the man, who closed the register, gave Darshan a quick glance and left the room.
‘Please check this cartridge, sir,’ Dhruvi requested Darshan, once the door had closed. ‘You will find that it has not been wiped.’
‘What!’ Darshan’s composure had finally crumbled. He shot a glance at Moin. ‘Are you sure?’
‘We checked
it in the police cyber lab and were able to recover a file with over a million of MyMagicHat’s orders.’
Darshan stared at her, speechless, the colour slowly draining from his resolutely impassive face. His gaze moved and held Gautam’s for a long moment before briefly resting on Moin and returning to Dhruvi.
‘Good Lord!’ he said in a hushed voice.
Beads of sweat had broken out on his wide forehead. The tips of his fingers trembled as he reached out and took the cartridge from Dhruvi.
‘How did it come into your possession, may I ask?’ he eventually said.
‘The recycler, Manoj, was offering MyMagicHat’s data for sale. We raided his shop.’
‘Good Lord!’ Darshan gasped again and let out a long breath. His face had gone white. ‘Thank you for bringing it to my notice. This is a huge embarrassment for me. Massive.’ His gaze flickered to Gautam. ‘Mr Puraria, I apologize unreservedly for this lapse. I will get to the bottom of it immediately.’
‘Do that, Darshan,’ Gautam responded. ‘What do you think went wrong?’
‘The last task in the procedure, Mr Puraria. I suspect that the person who was entrusted to wipe it didn’t do the needful. I can’t say if it was deliberate or not. I don’t know if it was negligence, incompetence or if it was intentional. Whatever it is, I’ll get to the bottom of it. Such a breach is unacceptable.’
‘It is,’ Gautam agreed. ‘If this has happened with MyMagicHat’s confidential information, it can happen with the confidential information of any other company you serve.’
Darshan nodded miserably.
‘Dilip is aware of this,’ Gautam continued. ‘I suggest you make some progress before you speak to him.’
‘No, sir.’ Darshan shook his head. Whatever little colour he had regained drained from his face at the mention of Dilip’s name. ‘I will call him immediately and own up to this. This is too critical a matter for me to delay.’
Moin cleared his throat and three sets of eyes turned to him.
‘There is one other matter I need to look into, sir,’ Moin said to Darshan. ‘I don’t know how a text file with over a million transactions got created in the first place. As far as I know, MyMagicHat’s systems create no such file.’
‘That’s right, Moin.’ Darshan’s nod was sure, confident. ‘The front-end writes directly into a back-end database as soon as an order is confirmed. No transaction file is passed.’
‘It could have been created at the MyMagicHat office using a query, sir. But if that was the case, how did the file get into a tape cartridge at the data centre?’
‘How indeed?’
Again, Darshan had no hesitation in agreeing with Moin. He was lost in deep thought for a long moment and shook his head slowly.
‘While you find out how the cartridge reached the recycler without being wiped,’ Gautam told Darshan, ‘Moin will determine how such a transaction file found its way into a backup tape cartridge.’
■
The four Puraria men sat up late after dinner in their mansion in Mumbai. Sashikant was nursing his habitual post-dinner cognac, but his sons abstained in deference. None of them would consume alcohol in their father’s presence.
Gautam had briefed them and, along with Dilip, fielded a barrage of questions. Not only did the data theft impact MyMagicHat, it also had wider ramifications stemming from the breach in the group’s data centre. The three older Purarias talked softly amongst themselves, as Gautam took a phone call by the large bay window.
Presently, he hung up and returned to the conclave.
‘You handled it well, Chotu,’ Raj said, as Gautam took his seat. ‘You caught the culprits in less than 48 hours. Good work.’
‘Thank you, Bhaiya,’ Gautam said distractedly. ‘In all honesty, it was the police who cracked it. Not me.’
Compliments from Raj were rare and usually well earned. Normally, Gautam would have been delighted and his feelings would have been evident in his manner. But now it didn’t seem to matter much.
‘That was Darshan on the phone,’ he continued. ‘Prompt, as usual, he has got to the bottom of it. One of the operators at the data centre has been hand-in-glove with the recycler, Manoj.’
‘That was quick!’ Dilip said, smiling with relief. ‘Really quick, even for Darshan. What happened?’
‘The police found a carton of used tape cartridges in Manoj’s shop, which they showed to Darshan. He noted the numbers on their labels and immediately checked his disposal register. All cartridges in the carton were from our data centre. They represented the last three batches he had disposed of.
‘When he checked the identity of the person in charge of the last three disposals, he hit a jackpot. It was the same operator. Darshan confronted him immediately.
‘The man first denied it, but when Darshan finally said that he would then have no option but to hand the case over to the police, the man cracked. He confessed and talked about the arrangement he had with Manoj. Darshan feels that another operator, who was to do a random check on the cartridges, may have been involved too. He hasn’t told the police yet. He called to ask what we wanted him to do.’
‘Good man!’ Dilip said, nodding appreciatively.
‘Darshan may have got to the bottom of it, but we still have a problem,’ Raj interjected. ‘If word gets out that data has been leaking from our data centre, we will have big trouble. Our customers may leave –’
‘More than that, we may have legal cases on our hands,’ Sashikant rumbled, cutting off his eldest son. ‘This could potentially be a breach of contract.’
‘But we’ve taken all reasonable precautions a data centre is expected to take. Isn’t that so, Dilip?’
Even as Dilip nodded, Sashikant disagreed.
‘That remains to be seen, Raj. Our claiming so isn’t enough. Our idea of what is reasonable may not be the same as our customers’ notions. An independent third party will need to be appointed to determine that. And you know how these audits go – they exaggerate even the smallest of violations so that the auditor can cover his own backside.’
‘That isn’t the only problem, either,’ Gautam added. ‘What will happen if Kantoff Capital hears of this? Potentially, competitors have had access to MyMagicHat’s confidential data. This could sabotage everything. Project Iskan could fall through.’
‘You spoke to this Deswani fellow today, Raj.’ Sashikant turned to his eldest son. ‘Did you sense anything amiss?’
‘I didn’t speak of the data theft or the bugs,’ Raj said. ‘They are getting increasingly worried about Puneet’s disappearance. Counting today, five whole days have gone by and there is still no sign of him – dead or alive. I believe the police are taking it seriously now, but no sign of him in hospitals, mortuaries or anywhere else. His phone is still switched off and his cards haven’t been used.’
‘Are they going through with the deal?’
‘He was reluctant to talk about it. Personally, Vikram is very keen. I know that for sure. But it is a larger call that involves other PE firms.’
‘Yes, the consortium. Did he give any time frame?’
‘I believe they are having conference calls daily. Nigel wants some clarity on what happened to Puneet. He apparently told Vikram that his gut says something is wrong.’
‘I will have to speak to his gut,’ Sashikant growled. ‘Remind me tomorrow, Raj.’ He turned to Gautam. ‘How is the cash situation?’
‘Precarious. A big campaign is coming up early next month.’
‘And the bugs? Any progress?’
Gautam shook his head. ‘I’ve been tied up with this data theft problem and Nilay is running a business-as-usual shop while trying to conserve cash.’
‘This security agency that swept the office,’ Sashikant said, ‘do you know them?’
‘KRS Surveillance? Not really. They were introduced to me by an acquaintance.’
‘How does he know them?’
‘He works in the forensic practice of a global audit firm. They
investigate frauds. This security firm has worked for a number of their clients, including a couple in the e-commerce sector.’
‘Is this surveillance firm based in Bengaluru?’
Gautam nodded. ‘Set up last year.’
‘Did you say that they have worked for e-commerce companies?’ Dilip asked. ‘Competitors?’
‘Uh-huh.’
The conversation stopped abruptly. The first ripples of doubt rose in Gautam’s mind as he saw Raj and Sashikant frown. Dilip had grown thoughtful.
‘So,’ Sashikant said slowly. ‘We don’t know them and they have worked for competitors. Where does that leave us?’
‘What made you call them in the first place, Gautam?’ Raj asked, before his sibling could respond to their father’s question. ‘Did you suspect that the office was bugged?’
‘Um…not really. But considering the hyper-competitive nature of e-tailing, I thought it was a good idea.’
‘True. But something must have put the idea into your head. When did it first occur to you to call these guys?’
‘During a conversation with my acquaintance.’
‘The forensic guy?’
Gautam nodded. Doubts began gnawing at him.
‘I may be completely off the mark here,’ Dilip interjected softly. ‘But how do we know that the office was, indeed, bugged? We only have the agency’s word for it. What if there were no bugs? What if they just showed you some bugs and claimed that they had been found in your false ceiling?’
‘That’s possible.’ Gautam’s uncertainty was deepening. ‘But why would they want to do that?’
‘Any number of reasons. For one, they are a new firm that needs customers. So they could have misled you to get your business. Worse, what if they used it as a cover to plant listening devices?’
Gautam stared at Dilip. The logic was irrefutable. Come to think of it, he didn’t know KRS Surveillance from Adam. As he cast his mind back, he grew uncomfortably certain that the thought of sweeping the office for bugs had been planted by his forensic acquaintance.
