ISI plans home-grown honey traps, AI-generated women to target Indians

The ISI is reportedly shifting its honey-trapping operations from Pakistan to smaller Indian towns, using AI-generated images and videos to target recruits and officials. Intelligence agencies face growing challenges, with recent reports indicating increased attempts to obtain sensitive defence information

New Delhi: The ISI’s honey-trap module has become one of India’s biggest security challenges. With each passing day, the agencies are arresting scores of people both common citizens as well as officials who have been accused of sharing sensitive information with Pakistan’s ISI after being honey-trapped. While dealing with this issue has become an ongoing operation for the Indian agencies, the new problem lies in the fact that the ISI wants to make these honey-trapping modules completely home-grown in nature and also use Artificial Intelligence-generated images.

An Intelligence Bureau official says that this would pose a fresh challenge for the Indian agencies. All these years, the honey-trapping modules were being run exclusively from Faridkot in Pakistan. Between 2015 and 2019, the ISI had earmarked a huge budget of Rs 3,000 crore to run this module. This only suggests the scale at which the ISI has been undertaking operations, the official also said.

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However, the ISI now wants the module to be completely shifted out of Pakistan and to be run exclusively in India alone. This aligns with the ISI’s policy of ensuring that all terror related acts where India is concerned are home- grown so that the trail does not lead back to Pakistan. An official said that the ISI would however be focussing not on major cities to put up such modules. It would look for smaller towns or villages to set up such modules so that the heat is lower.

An official said that earlier the ISI had its recruits in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh who would report to their Faridkot handlers. Now the ISI is looking to move even into the southern towns to set up similar modules.

However, the main focus would be on smaller towns where it is easier to recruit people by offering them a good amount of money, the official said. Another official said that recent investigations have found that the ISI has used porn and nudity to trap people and elicit sensitive information from them.

Further the ISI had also appointed a good number of pretty looking girls to set traps and then extract information particularly relating to the defence forces, the official said.

Now, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the job of the ISI has become even easier. AI generated images and videos of women would be created and traps would be set. Now this would pose an even bigger problem for the Indian agencies as in many cases, they would not even be dealing with a real accused person, the official also added.

Moving the honey-trapping modules to the smaller towns of India and then using AI to set traps makes the problem even more complex for the Indian security agencies. They are already dealing with the problem on a major scale and latest Intelligence reports even suggest that the ISI has set its eyes on the newly appointed Agniveers. Such persons could easily fall prey as there is not much awareness, especially on the technological front.

Such persons could easily fall prey to the AI generated videos or images as they would not be able to tell easily between what is real and fake.

Officials say that the ISI’s primary interest is to gather information about the Indian armed forces. Such information could be used to gain the upper hand during a battle. It would also be used to embarrass the Indian armed forces.

Post Operation Sindoor, the cases of honey-trapping have gone up multi-fold. The operation that was carried out to avenge the Pahalgam terror attack exposed the entire Pakistani eco-system while also calling out their nuclear bluff. The Pakistanis are hell-bent on getting back and hence these honey-trapping exercises have only gone up ten-fold so that the Indian armed forces could be embarrassed, an official said.