#FactCheck - Viral Video Claiming to Show Kashmir Avalanche Is AI-Generated

Executive Summary:

The viral image in the social media which depicts fake injuries on the face of the MP(Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha) Kangana Ranaut alleged to have been beaten by a CISF officer at the Chandigarh airport. The reverse search of the viral image taken back to 2006, was part of an anti-mosquito commercial and does not feature the MP,  Kangana Ranaut. The findings contradict the claim that the photos are evidence of injuries resulting from the incident involving the MP, Kangana Ranaut. It is always important to verify the truthfulness of  visual content before sharing it, to prevent misinformation.

Claims:

The images circulating on social media platforms claiming the injuries on the MP, Kangana Ranaut’s face were because of an assault incident by a female CISF officer at Chandigarh airport. This claim hinted that the photos are evidence of the physical quarrel and resulting injuries suffered by  the MP, Kangana Ranaut.

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Fact Check:

When we received the posts, we reverse-searched the image and found another photo that looked similar to the viral one. We could verify through the earring in the viral image with the new image. 

The reverse image search revealed that the photo was originally uploaded in 2006 and is unrelated to the MP, Kangana Ranaut. It depicts a model in an advertisement for an anti-mosquito spray campaign.

We can validate this from the earrings in the photo after the comparison   between the two photos.

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Hence, we can confirm that the viral image of the injury mark of the MP, Kangana Ranaut has been debunked as fake and misleading, instead it has been cropped out from the original photo to misrepresent the context.

Conclusion:

Therefore, the viral photos on social media which claimed to be the results of injuries on the MP, Kangana Ranaut’s face after being assaulted allegedly by a CISF officer at the airport in Chandigarh were fake. Detailed analysis of the pictures provided the fact that the pictures have no connection with Ranaut; the picture was a 2006 anti-mosquito spray advertisement; therefore, the allegations that show these images as that of Ranaut’s injury are fake and misleading.

• Claim:  photos circulating on social media claiming to show injuries on the MP, Kangana Ranaut's face following an assault incident by a female CISF officer at Chandigarh airport.
• Claimed on: X (Formerly known as Twitter), thread, Facebook
• Fact Check: Fake & Misleading

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Perth, Western Australia — For most of the past year, the name TeamPCP has circulated quietly within cybersecurity circles as shorthand for a particular kind of dread: not the dread of a phishing email or a suspicious link, but the dread of software you already trusted turning against you. This week, that quiet circulation became public record. The Australian Federal Police, working alongside the FBI and the Western Australia Police Force, arrested and charged two Western Australian men, aged 21 and 23, with a combined 14 offences over their alleged role in the group.

The arrests themselves are notable. The story behind them is more so.

A Campaign Built on Borrowed Trust

TeamPCP's alleged method was not to break down the front door. It was to compromise the door itself, the trusted mechanisms by which developers pull code into their own projects every day. The group has been linked to widespread supply-chain attacks that targeted open-source software and developer platforms to steal credentials, authentication secrets, and source code, with high-profile incidents affecting projects including Trivy, LiteLLM, Telnyx, SAP, and TanStack, alongside breaches at organisations such as the European Commission, Mistral AI, OpenAI, and GitHub. Reporting has also linked the campaign to ecosystems including GitHub Actions, Docker Hub, npm, PyPI and OpenVSX, the invisible plumbing through which most modern software is assembled.

The scale, as alleged by investigators, is difficult to overstate. Authorities say the malicious code potentially compromised over a thousand organisations worldwide, enabling the theft of roughly half a million credentials and the exfiltration of at least 300GB of data, figures that should be understood as allegations under active investigation rather than an independently verified victim count. The AFP itself has said the compromise of a small number of trusted software components had a significant global impact, with remediation costs estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Why This Attack Was So Hard to See Coming

The mechanics matter. Rather than tricking a user into clicking something malicious, the alleged operation worked by compromising the credentials developers use to publish legitimate software updates, then pushing tampered versions out through the same trusted distribution pipelines millions of applications rely on automatically. There is no obviously suspicious file, no rogue website, only a routine update, arriving exactly where it was expected.

Investigators also describe a cascading structure to the intrusions: credentials harvested from one compromised project reportedly opened the door to the next, turning isolated breaches into a chain reaction across the open-source ecosystem. TeamPCP has been described as running one of the most consequential campaigns of software supply-chain attacks investigators have tracked, and the group's reach extended notably into the AI stack — LiteLLM, one of the projects reportedly compromised, is an open-source gateway widely used to connect applications to large language model providers, meaning the attack's blast radius extended into the very infrastructure powering today's AI boom.

The Investigation and the Charges

The two men were charged following a joint investigation by the AFP and WAPF, working in parallel with the FBI, into what authorities describe as a sophisticated cybercrime syndicate accused of creating malicious open-source software to defraud thousands of global businesses. The charges span identity theft, unauthorised data modification, and money laundering, with maximum penalties ranging from three to twenty years' imprisonment. Search warrants were executed in Perth on 26 August 2026, and investigators seized electronic devices for forensic analysis after raids at properties in Cottesloe, Hamilton Hill, and Mandurah. FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Brett Leatherman noted the significance of the international cooperation involved in the case, while investigators have not ruled out further arrests.

The Real Story: A Governance Problem, Not Just a Crime Story

It would be easy to file this under "hackers caught" and move on. But the more consequential story is structural. Modern organisations do not merely secure their own infrastructure, they inherit risk from every library, package, CI/CD pipeline, repository, vendor and developer tool they depend on, often without ever auditing that dependency chain directly. Guidance from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on securing open-source software has increasingly emphasised managing these dependencies through software bills of materials (SBOMs), precisely because so few organisations can otherwise answer a basic question: what, exactly, is running inside our systems?

TeamPCP's alleged campaign is a case study in why that question can no longer be optional. If an organisation's security posture is only as strong as the thousands of components it silently trusts, then supply-chain security is not a developer problem to be quietly patched — it is a governance issue, deserving board-level attention, vendor accountability frameworks, and mandatory disclosure practices.

CyberPeace's Take

At CyberPeace, we've been watching campaigns like TeamPCP's less as isolated incidents and more as a pattern that keeps repeating with higher stakes each time. What stands out to our team isn't the sophistication of the code, open-source poisoning is, frankly, not a new technique, it's the sophistication of patience. Compromising a maintainer's publishing credentials and simply waiting for the next scheduled release to carry the payload downstream is a strategy built for an ecosystem that still largely operates on implicit trust rather than continuous verification. That gap between how fast software moves and how slowly trust is actually checked is precisely where operations like this thrive.

We'd also push back gently on treating this as a "developer hygiene" story. Most engineering teams pulling in a package from npm or PyPI are not, and should not be expected to be, forensically auditing every dependency update by hand, that isn't scalable, and it was never a realistic line of defence. The actual fix has to sit further upstream: provenance verification baked into CI/CD pipelines, signed commits and releases treated as non-negotiable rather than optional, and SBOMs that are actually queried during incident response rather than generated once and filed away.

Our broader concern, honestly, is about incentive alignment. Open-source maintainers are frequently unpaid or under-resourced volunteers holding publishing keys to software depended on by billion-dollar enterprises. Until organisations that consume open-source software at scale start meaningfully funding its security, not just its development,  this pattern isn't going away. It will simply find its next entry point.

References

• Australian Federal Police. Two WA men charged following AFP-FBI-WAPF disruption of alleged global cybercrime syndicate. afp.gov.au
• Bleeping Computer. Australia arrests alleged TeamPCP hackers behind supply-chain attacks. bleepingcomputer.com
• CyberScoop. Two alleged TeamPCP members arrested and charged after months of software supply-chain chaos. cyberscoop.com
• Cyber Daily. Busted! Alleged Aussie hackers linked to TeamPCP arrested in joint AFP-FBI-WAPF operation. cyberdaily.au
• Help Net Security. Two alleged TeamPCP hackers arrested over global supply chain attacks. helpnetsecurity.com
• Krebs on Security. Two Alleged 'TeamPCP' Hackers Arrested in Australia. krebsonsecurity.com
• TechCrunch. Australian police arrest two over TeamPCP hacks targeting Mercor, OpenAI, and others. techcrunch.com
• The Hacker News. Alleged TeamPCP Hackers Charged in Australia Over Major Supply Chain Attacks. thehackernews.com

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Introduction

Embark on a groundbreaking exploration of the Darkweb Metaverse, a revolutionary fusion of the enigmatic dark web with the immersive realm of the metaverse. Unveiling a decentralised platform championing freedom of speech, the Darkverse promises unparalleled diversity of expression. However, as we delve into this digital frontier, we must tread cautiously, acknowledging the security risks and societal challenges that accompany the metaverse's emergence.

The Dark Metaverse is a unique combination of the mysterious dark web and the immersive digital world known as the metaverse. Imagine a place where users may participate in decentralised social networking, communicate anonymously, and freely express a range of viewpoints. It aims to provide an alternative to traditional online platforms, emphasizing privacy and freedom of speech. Nevertheless, it also brings new kinds of criminality and security issues, so it's important to approach this digital frontier cautiously.

In the vast expanse of the digital cosmos, there exists a realm that remains shrouded in mystery to the casual netizen—the dark web. It is a place where the surface web, the familiar territory of Google searches and social media feeds, constitutes a mere 5 per cent of the information iceberg floating in an ocean of data. Beneath this surface lies the deep web and the dark web, comprising the remaining 95 per cent, a staggering figure that beckons the brave and curious to explore its abysmal depths.

Imagine, a platform that not only ventures into these depths but intertwines them with the emerging concept of the metaverse—a digital realm that defeats the limitations of the physical world. This is the vision of the Darkweb Metaverse, the world’s premier endeavour to harness the enigmatic depths of the dark web and fuse it into the immersive experience of the metaverse.

As per Internet User Statistics 2024, There are over 5.3 billion Internet users in the world, meaning over 65% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. The Internet is used for various services. News, entertainment, and communication to name a few. The citizens of developed countries depend on the World Wide Web for a multitude of daily tasks such as academic research, online shopping, E-banking, accessing news and even ordering food online hence the Internet has become an integral part of our daily lives.

Surface Web

This layer of the internet is used by the general public on a daily basis. The contents of this layer are accessed by standard web browsers namely Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox to name a few. The contents of this layer of the internet are indexed by these search engines.

Deep Web

This is the second layer of the internet; its contents are not indexed by search engines. The content that is unavailable on the surface web is considered to be a part of the deep web. The deep web comprises a collection of various types of confidential information. Several Schools, Universities, Institutes, Government Offices and Departments, Multinational Companies (MNCs), and Private Companies store their database information and website-oriented server information such as online profile and accounts usernames or IDs and passwords or log in credentials and companies' premium subscription data and monetary transactional records in the Intra-net which is part of the deep web.

Dark Web

It is the least explored part of the internet which is considered to be a hub of various bizarre activities. The contents of the dark web are not indexed by search engines and specific software is required to access this layer of the internet namely TOR (The Onion Router) browser which cloaks to identify its users making them anonymous. The websites of the dark web are identified from .onion TLD (Top Level Domain). Due to anonymity provided in this layer, various criminal activities take place over there including Drugs trading, Arms trading, and Illegal PayPal account details to websites offering child pornography.

The Darkverse 

The Darkweb Metaverse is not a mere novelty; it is a revolutionary step forward, a decentralised social networking platform that stands in stark contrast to centralised counterparts like YouTube or Twitter. Here, the spectre of censorship is banished, and the freedom of speech reigns supreme. 

The architectonic prowess behind the Darkweb Metaverse is formidable. The development team is a coalition of former infrastructure maestros from Theta Network and virtuosos of metaverse design, bolstered by backend engineers from Gensokishi Metaverse. At the helm is a CEO whose tenure at the apex of large Japanese companies has endowed him with a profound understanding of the landscape, setting a solid foundation for the platform's future triumphs.

Financially, the dark web has been a flourishing underworld, with revenues ranging from $1.5 billion to $3.1 billion between 2020 and 2022. Darkverse, with its emphasis on user-friendliness and safety, is poised to capture a significant portion of this user base. The platform serves as a truly decentralised amalgamation of the Dark Web, Metaverse, and Social Networking Services (SNS), with a mission to provide an unassailable bastion for freedom of speech and expression.

The Darkweb Metaverse is not merely a sanctuary for anonymity and privacy; it is a crucible for the diversity of expression. In a world where centralised platforms can muzzle voices, Darkverse stands as a bulwark against such suppression, fostering a community where a kaleidoscope of opinions and information thrives. The ease of use is unparalleled—a one-time portal that obviates the need for third-party software to access the dark web, protecting users from the myriad risks that typically accompany such ventures.

Moreover, the platform's ability to verify the authenticity of information is a game-changer. In an era laced with misinformation, especially surrounding contentious issues like war, Darkverse offers a sign of truth where the source of information can be scrutinised for its accuracy.

Integrating Technologies 

The metaverse will be an immersive iteration of the internet, decked with interactive features of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, 3D graphics, 5G, holograms, NFTs, blockchain and haptic sensors. Each building block, while innovative, carries its own set of risks—vulnerabilities and design flaws that could pose a serious threat to the integrated meta world.

The dark web's very nature of interaction through avatars makes it a perfect candidate for a metaverse iteration. Here, in this anonymous world, commercial and personal engagements occur without the desire to unveil real identities. The metaverse's DNA is well-suited to the dark web, presenting a formidable security challenge as it is likely to evolve more rapidly than its real-world counterpart.

While Meta (formerly Facebook) is a prominent entity developing the metaverse, other key players include NVIDIA, Epic Games, Microsoft, Apple, Decentraland, Roblox Corporation, Unity Software, Snapchat, and Amazon. These companies are integral to constructing the vast network of real-time 3D virtual worlds where users maintain their identities and payment histories.

Yet, with innovation comes risk. The metaverse will necessitate police stations, not as a dystopian oversight but as a means to address the inherent challenges of a new digital society. In India, for instance, the integration of law enforcement within the metaverse could revolutionize the public's interaction with the police, potentially increasing the reporting of crimes.

The Perils within the Darkverse

The metaverse will also be a fertile ground for crimes of a new dimension—identity theft, digital asset hijacking, and the influence of metaverse interactions on real-world decisions. With a significant portion of social media profiles potentially being fraudulent, the metaverse amplifies these challenges, necessitating robust identity access management.

The integration of NFTs into the metaverse ecosystem is not without its security concerns, as token breaches and hacks remain a persistent threat. The metaverse's parallel economy will test the developers' ability to engender trust, a Herculean task that will challenge the boundaries of national economies.

Moreover, the metaverse will be a crucible for social engineering-based attacks, where the real-time and immersive nature of interactions could make individuals particularly vulnerable to deception and manipulation. The potential for early-stage fraud, such as the hyping and selling of virtual assets at unrealistic prices, is a stark reality.

The metaverse also presents numerous risks, particularly for children and adolescents who may struggle to distinguish  between virtual and real worlds. The implications of such immersive experiences are intense, with the potential to influence behaviour in hazardous ways.

Security risks extend to the technologies supporting the metaverse, such as virtual and augmented reality. The exploitation of biometric data, the bridging of virtual and real worlds, and the tendency for polarisation and societal isolation are all issues requiring immediate attention.

A Way Forward

As we stand on the cusp of this new digital frontier, it is evident that the metaverse, despite its reliance on blockchain, is not immune to the privacy and security breaches that have plagued conventional IT infrastructure. Data security, Identity theft, network security, and ransomware attacks are just a few of the challenges on the way.

In this quest into the unknown, the Darkweb Metaverse radiates with the promise of freedom and the thrill of discovery. Yet, as we navigate these shadowy depths, we must remain vigilant, for the very technologies that empower us also rear the seeds of our grim vulnerabilities. The metaverse is not just a new chapter in the story of the internet—it is a whole narrative, one that we must write with caution and care.

References 

• https://spores.medium.com/the-worlds-first-platform-to-deploy-the-dark-web-in-the-metaverse-releap-ido-on-spores-launchpad-a36387b184de 
• https://www.makeuseof.com/how-hackers-sell-trade-data-in-metaverse/
• https://www.demandsage.com/internet-user-statistics/#:~:text=There%20are%20over%205.3%20billion,has%20access%20to%20the%20Internet.

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