In a shocking security breach that has sent waves of anxiety through the Indian entertainment industry, filmmakers Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s production house, Tiger Baby Digital LLP, fell victim to a massive data theft.
A trusted, long-time employee has been arrested for systematically stealing and selling high-capacity storage drives from the company’s office in Bandra West, Mumbai, putting millions of dollars worth of unreleased content at immediate risk of leaking online.
The Setup and Discovery
The production house maintained a carefully organized repository of 119 industrial-grade hard disks, with storage capacities ranging from 16 TB to a massive 72 TB. These weren’t standard consumer drives; they housed the literal lifeblood of the company—raw multi-camera shooting footage, rough edits, scene cuts, advertising master files, and post-production backups.
The theft unraveled on May 21, 2026, via a bizarre sequence of events:
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The Missing Drive: Editorial team members asked a support staffer to fetch a specific hard drive required for their daily workflow.
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The Delay: The staffer repeatedly stalled, giving evasive answers and delaying his return.
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The Ghostly Discovery: Suspicious of the delay, Executive Assistant and HR Administrator Mehjabeen Mushtaq Shaikh personally inspected the storage cupboard.
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The Cover-Up: While the cupboard itself was completely untouched, several packaging boxes inside were found partially burnt, empty, and stripped of the actual hard drives. An internal audit quickly confirmed a devastating reality: 66 out of 119 hard disks were completely missing.
Intellectual Property at Risk
While the physical hardware itself is valued around ₹12–13 lakh, the intellectual property stored inside is practically priceless. Industry insiders warn that if the drives are accessed or leaked on the dark web or grey market, the financial and legal fallout could easily climb into crores.
The Insider Threat: Inside the Investigation
The Bandra Police swiftly moved in following an FIR, uncovering an inside job that had been quietly running for nearly half a year.
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The Primary Accused: Police arrested Mohammad Shahid Azim Khan, an office boy who had worked loyally at Tiger Baby for seven years. Because of his tenure, he was entrusted with retrieving and managing the drives.
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The Modus Operandi: Khan confessed to stealing 24 drives over the past five months. To throw coworkers off the scent, he allegedly damaged and partially torched the empty cardboard boxes to make it look like an accidental technical or electrical mishap had destroyed them.
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The Receiver: Khan sold those 24 drives to a 44-year-old Borivali resident identified as Ritesh Suresh Shah, pocketing a meager ₹15,000 to ₹20,000 per disk—a fraction of the hardware’s worth, let alone the data. Both Khan and Shah have been remanded to police custody until May 29.
The Critical Unanswered Question
The Bandra Police, under DCP Mohit Garg, face a race against time. While Khan admitted to stealing 24 drives, 42 hard disks remain completely unaccounted for. Investigators are aggressively interrogating the suspects to find where the rest of the stash went and have looped in cyber experts to verify whether any data was cloned, backed up, or sold to digital piracy syndicates before the physical hardware vanished.
