Digital detective who is fighting cybercrime for police, corporates and schools

Indian Express

11 hours ago

A large map of the world dominates the main wall of Yogesh Thanage's office. The planet is also present as paper weights near his desk. Thanage is a globetrotter, but not of the touristy sort. Founder of ShellStrong Technologies, he is a detective of the virtual world. Competing for space in his workplace at Senapati Bapat Marg are countless awards and citations from India's law enforcement agencies, such as the Pune Police and Uttarakhand Police, and revenue departments, for whom Thanage renders essential services.
'Earlier, the police, income tax department, revenue departments or customs departments would conduct only physical searches. Today, those searches extend to the digital world because everybody, now, lives in two different worlds, online and offline,' he says. His job as an investigator and forensic expert is to acquire artefacts present in the digital world, such as electronic records from mobile phones, computers, and internet, extract them and analyse them for understanding.
'We check the relevance of those facts with the actual deeds of the suspect revealed through forensic investigation before submitting them to the authorities with a certificate as per the law,' says Thanage.
Pointing to the map, he adds, 'Wherever we have clients, we place a flag on the map. There's the UAE, the US, Australia, Germany, Canada, and India. We have a lot of space to cover.' The company, set up in 2018, ensures preparedness and resilience to private clients as well, with a long list of corporates as well as social media influencers.
Thanage has had corporate clients who are losing regular customers. Someone is leaking data from their company and giving it to competitors. Then, a lot of schools and colleges come to him to help them investigate certain cases in which the students have created fake profiles of many teachers and professors.
According to DataLEADS, which released a report around two weeks ago, cybercrime is draining the nation. Indians became victims of Rs 22,842 crore to online fraudsters in 2024, a three-time surge from the Rs 7,465 crore lost in 2023 and 10 times higher than the Rs 2,306 crore from 2022. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) estimates that cybercrime losses could cross Rs 1.2 lakh crore in 2025 if unchecked.
'As we become more digitised and enjoy the convenience of accessing data, the threat is going to increase. Digitalisation is coming to our personal spaces like home, through IoT devices. Soon, we will have robots to clean our floors in almost every household. Cars are becoming nothing more than moving computers,' says Thanage. 'People feel, 'If I go to the internet, I can create fake profiles, fake email, fake Instagram and Facebook pages, and can do anything'. They forget that these are more monitored than the real world.'
A computer science grad from 2008, Thanage was a wiz at programming. Soon enough, he was hacking to improve his skills. At a Cybersecurity Conference in Pune in 2007, Thanage was discussing his hacking skills unaware that the person sitting next to him in the audience, in plainclothes, was a cyber cell police officer. 'When he introduced himself during the tea break, I was apprehensive. Instead, he told me to apply to Nasscom, which was setting up a Pune Cyber Lab. I was selected during the interview as a volunteer,' says Thanage. He rose to be the Senior Project Manager by 2017, gaining levels of experience as he helped the police solve several important crimes.
ShellStrong, which he set up by cleaning out his savings, has taken him on the entrepreneurial journey of hope, errors, debts, bankruptcy, and bounce-back. In 2018-2019, the company had three private clients. In 2020, when Covid hit, the number reached almost 20. At present, the company has 75 clients, with almost 100 per cent retention. 'I still believe in word-of-mouth reputation because, in security, that gives more assurance. Hence, the new tagline for ShellStrong, Inspired from Ratan Tata's quote, is 'Ethics and values above all.'' he says.
One of the reasons people commit cybercrime is that they feel anonymous and invincible. 'The truth is that the internet is not anonymous. We have lost our privacy, thanks to all the free services that we use,' he says.