Dubai: These attacks often follow a simple template. A story making serious allegations against a business appears online. It uses genuine details, such as the company's name, owners, locations or business history, and builds an unverified or misleading claim around them. Then the same story is published across several unrelated websites in different countries, often under slightly altered headlines with no bylines. To a reader, it can look like independent confirmation.

That is what Dubai-based Best Oasis, which is a leading cash buyer of ships and energy assets worldwide, and India’s largest green ship recycling yard Priya Blue Industries, which runs ship-recycling yards in Alang, Gujarat, faced.…