#FactCheck-Fake X Account Falsely Poses as India’s Ministry of External Affairs
Executive Summary
A social media account on X (formerly Twitter) named @MEABharat is being circulated as the official account of India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Many users are sharing posts from the account, believing it to be an authentic government handle and treating the information published there as official communication. CyberPeace Research Wing’s research found the viral claim to be misleading. Our research revealed that @MEABharat is not an official X account of the Ministry of External Affairs. The Ministry has publicly clarified that it has no association with the account and stated that it is impersonating the Ministry, misleading the public, and undermining public interest.
Claim
Social media users are claiming that @MEABharat is the official X account of India's Ministry of External Affairs and that the information posted on the account is officially issued by the Ministry.
https://x.com/MEAFactCheck/status/2076650791453270332
Fact Check
To verify the claim, we conducted a keyword-based search on Google. During the research, we found an official clarification posted by the Ministry of External Affairs' fact-check handle, @MEAFactCheck. In its post, the Ministry clearly stated that the @MEABharat account has no connection whatsoever with the Ministry of External Affairs. It further clarified that the account is impersonating the Ministry, misleading the public, and undermining public interest. The Ministry also advised users to exercise caution and rely only on its verified official social media accounts and website for authentic information.
https://x.com/MEAFactCheck/status/2076650791453270332
As part of our research, we also examined the Ministry's official X account, @MEAIndia, which carries the verified blue badge. The account regularly publishes official statements, diplomatic updates, press briefings, and other communications related to India's foreign policy. It also serves as the official spokesperson's handle for the Ministry of External Affairs.
https://x.com/MEAIndia
Conclusion
Our research found that @MEABharat is not the official X account of India's Ministry of External Affairs. The Ministry itself has publicly clarified that the account is fake, has no affiliation with the government, and is impersonating the Ministry to mislead the public. Therefore, the claim that @MEABharat is the official MEA handle is misleading. Users should rely only on the Ministry's verified accounts, including @MEAIndia and @MEAFactCheck, for authentic government information.
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Introduction
Established in the US, one of the world’s largest cab networks came into existence in 2010 and, since its inception, has expanded all over the globe with operations in 10,000 cities across 71 countries. It made a remarkable start in India in 2017 and, since then, has seen a rise in the customers and drivers for the company. India is among the largest markets for Uber, with 600,000 monthly drivers and 8.5 million monthly riders.
GeM
Government e-Marketplace (GeM) is a one-stop portal to facilitate online procurement of common-use Goods & Services required by various Government Departments / Organizations / PSUs. GeM aims to enhance transparency, efficiency and speed in public procurement. It provides the tools of e-bidding, reverses e-auction and demand aggregation to facilitate government users achieve the best value for their money. Government e-Marketplace owes its genesis to the recommendations of two Groups of Secretaries to the Prime Minister in January 2016. They recommended setting up a dedicated e-market for different goods & services procured or sold by Government/PSUs besides reforming DGS&D. Subsequently, the Finance Minister, in his Budget speech for FY 2016-17, announced setting up of a technology-driven platform to facilitate procurement of goods and services by various Ministries and agencies of the Government. The portal was launched on 9th August 2016 by the Commerce & Industry Minister.
Uber-GeM collaboration
The cab network giant has registered on the portal of the Government E-marketplace and has declared that it will offer its services to Government officials from Ministries and PSUs. The project is currently in its pilot phase and shall be executed systematically to cover all the ministries and PSUs in the nation. The officials can book cabs at a fixed price with no cancellation or surge fees on the rides. The authorised officials will be able to book a cab from the portal and select from the list of drivers available. It will be a cashless/cardless ride for the officials; additional vehicle categories for government riders have been added, namely, GeM Yatraa Hatch and GeM Yatraa Sedan, and there will be hourly rentals for multiple-stops, allowing the government officials to enjoy the flexible and easily accessible network of cabs in major cities.
Advantages
Such collaboration between Government institutions and corporates will go a long way to secure a stable equilibrium in the market. Uber, a US-based company, enjoys a vast user base in India and has created new job avenues. The advantages of the collaboration between GeM and Uber are as follows-
Easy accessibility
This will undoubtedly provide ease in accessibility in terms of being in a new place, and language barriers will no longer exist with such options for Government officials.
Increased jobs for drivers
With more cabs being engaged with ministries and PSUs, it is pertinent that the requirement for drivers will grow, thus increasing the employability rate in India and allowing the user to have an uninterrupted experience.
Ease of travel and commuting
This move will provide flexibility, thus leading to more ease in travel in cases of emergencies or places inaccessible by trains or other modes of transport.
Rise in travel and tourism
Coupled with the other factors, the opportunities for the users to visit different places will be an added advantage which will help boost the tourism industry, thus creating a balance in the market.
Sustainable Government corporate relationship
Such collaborations between the government and corporates will be substantial, signifying the ease of doing business in India. They will also act as a beacon of example for compliance with opportunities for the other companies and stakeholders.
Opportunities for collaboration with ingenious start-ups
With such major corporate joining hands with the government, the indigenous start-ups will have various opportunities to engage with companies and recreate similar businesses rooted in India, thus transforming the economy.
Conclusion
Transportation and communication play a vital role in our lives, thus, such collaboration will go a long way in creating a better and more uniform user experience in the country. This also goes a long way to showcase that the Governmental platforms also offer services of a global standard. Such portals exist in South Korea, Singapore, the US and Europe. The network of cabs can only be sustained using the locals as drivers, hence these collaborations are win-win for all as the market dynamics are improving, employability will increase, and improved user experience will be seen.
Executive Summary
Amid nationwide outrage over the gang-rape of a 13-year-old minor in Sriganganagar, Rajasthan, a video is circulating on social media. The clip shows police officers tying the hands of several accused individuals and parading them publicly on the streets. Users sharing the video claim that these are the culprits from the Sriganganagar case being beaten by the police.
A fact-check by the CyberPeace Research Wing found this claim to be misleading. The viral video has no connection to the Rajasthan incident; it actually depicts a separate event from Patan, Gujarat, dating back to March 2026.
The Claim
On July 7, 2026, a user on X (formerly Twitter) shared the video with the caption: "32 jihadis assaulted, brutalized, and raped a 13-year-old girl for five days. These criminals must get the harshest punishment to set an example."
https://x.com/RakeshKishore_l/status/2074400280352084129
Fact Check
To verify the viral claim, keyframes from the video were extracted and analysed using Google Lens for reverse image search. During the research, we found a report published by NDTV on March 19, 2026, which carried visuals matching the viral video. The report link and screenshot are provided below:
According to the NDTV report, a video showing police personnel publicly assaulting 18 alleged accused persons in Gujarat’s Patan district had surfaced. The incident was reported to have taken place during a crime scene reconstruction exercise.
The report stated that the accused, allegedly linked to an extortion gang, were taken to Chanasma for the reconstruction process. During the exercise, police personnel were seen assaulting them. Witnesses claimed that the accused were paraded through areas where they had allegedly created fear among locals.
The accused were reportedly linked to the alleged Jhiliya gang. The incident occurred days after a violent clash in which members of the same group allegedly attacked a police team, forcing officers to retreat from the spot.
During further research, we found a report published by ABP Asmita on March 19, 2026. According to the report, the incident was linked to an old dispute over temple donations.
The report stated that the accused were produced before a court, which sent them to five days of police custody until March 23, 2026. The report link and screenshot are provided below:
Conclusion
The research found that the viral video is not related to the alleged gang rape case in Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan. The video is being shared with a false context. The footage actually belongs to a separate incident from Gujarat’s Patan district reported in March 2026.
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
