TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Hackers disrupted the work of Iran’s Fars news company, a major source of data released during state protests over Mahsa Amini’s death, the company said, appearing to blame Israel.
Iran has been rocked by protests since Amini’s death in custody on Sept. 16, following his arrest for an alleged violation of the country’s women’s dress code.
Fars said its online page was disrupted Friday night through a “complex hacking and cyberattack operation. “
“The elimination of insects imaginableArray. . . it would possibly cause disorder at some of the agency’s facilities for a few days,” he said in a Saturday post on his Telegram channel.
“The cyber attacks against the Fars news firm are carried out almost from other countries, adding up the occupied territories (Israel),” he added, without elaborating.
On October 21, an organization called Black Reward said it had received documents similar to Iran’s nuclear program and demanded the release of all political prisoners and those arrested at the protests.
– Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) November 25, 2022
On November 23, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran stated that one of its subsidiaries had been attacked through “an express foreign country,” while downplaying the importance of the documents in question.
Iran, on the one hand, and Israel and the United States, on the other, have accused each other of cyberattacks.
On Thursday, a never-before-seen post on the Telegram social media service through an Iranian hacking organization showed a fatal bomb attack in Jerusalem the day before. The data obtained from the surveillance was used by a major Israeli security organization.
The organization, Moses Staff, claimed to have hacked into security cameras that were first intended to have been exploited by police. Earlier this year, the organization released photographs from dozens of cameras in Jerusalem and some in Tel Aviv.
“We have been watching them [sic] for many years, in every moment and at every step. This is just one component of our tracking of your activities through access to CCTV cameras in the country. We said that, let’s hit you when you never imagined it,” the band wrote on their Telegram channel in January.
Security officials showed that the camera in question is used through a primary security organization, but did not specify which one.
Officials downplayed the incident, the camera, which can be controlled remotely for pan, tilt and zoom, belonged to a civil society working with Israeli security services.
“There are no security breaches or leaks of classified information,” an official told Army Radio. The official said the camera was used “in a limited way” through the security company and was not connected to its systems.
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