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Iran Hacks US Spy Sites
superapecommando writes "Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps hacked into 29 websites affiliated with US espionage networks, Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency reported on Sunday. 'The hacked websites acted against Iran's national security under the cover of human rights activities,' Fars reported. It did not disclose details of the attacks.
The Internet has been used by Iranian opposition groups who contested the results of last year's elections there to organize demonstrations and share information about protests and arrests. The Revolutionary Guards is a military group that was founded after Iran's 1979 revolution. The group includes conventional army, navy, air force, and intelligence units, as well as the Basij paramilitary force and various business units."
I thought the idea of being a spy was to stay hidden. Why would you have a site if you are a spy? Oh...I get it to prop up the idea of a cyberwar. So when you get hacked you can tell everyone , "See I told you it was true!". Of course my next question is for the Iranians: dude why would the United State operate a spy website? Do you really think that the US government would put sensitive info in a website? Of course we are talking about the United States so anything is possible.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
First off, Fars news is the equivalent of Fox News in the US. They decide the news before it happens. Second off, the only thing worse than this crappy article with no references is CmdrTaco's poor summary of it that insinuates that the US was funding these sites even though the article says nothing about that being true.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were CIA fronts
That would surprise me. What wouldn't surprise me is if the 29 domains are all linked to the Iranian government. I think this is a ruse, designed to create the illusion that the Iranian government is a) capable enough to pre-emptively strike its "cyber attackers and b) to paint the Iranian government as a victim of attack, as opposed to the attacker.
So one side hacks computers because the other side is using computers to hack brains. I don't consider that just cause. Humans have built in firewalls against BS. Yes they can be overcome, but generally that is called persuasion, or deception depending on the validity of the information being uploaded. And keeping your populace sheltered from the outside might prevent the internet from hacking them, but in face to face conversations they will be even more vulnerable due to their ignorance.
On the bright side, I can't wait to watch the wars between cognitive dictatorships once we all upload.*
* Yes someone *has* been reading too much Stross.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
The military of a foreign government, with whom we have had less than cordial relations for at least 30 years, hacked some websites.
They claimed they were US spy websites.
They then proceeded to round up a bunch of people they didn't like and called them spies.
I'd call this business as usual in *insert oppressive nation*.
I'd question why the hell the Intel community would use open websites and specifically open websites which keep logs or in other way keep lists of all operatives.
The NSA has more cryptographers working for them than any other body on earth and you think they couldn't come up with a decent deniable, secure stenography scheme?
If you want to let someone communicate securely from inside hostile territory you don't give them a login to ultraspies.com and let the local government see their unusual connection to that site every week.
You hide your encrypted messages stenographically inside some lolcat pictures on some happy little facebook channel for people who love knitting.
(assuming you can find your arse with both hands and there is always the chance that the NSA and CIA can't manage that).
I'd say there's not much chance that the people arrested are any kind of real spies.