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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'm usually the first one to blame America when I see slanted reporting that seemingly puts our "enemies" in a very poor light, but this time I think we are looking at some pretty piss-poor Iranian folly.
Websites are passive. They respond to clients. They do not strike out on their own. So "hacking" them and shutting them down isn't really any sort of solution at all.
The Basij are a pretty rough security force compared to any typical military or paramilitary group. Despite their unprofessionalism, they are at the core of Iranian governmental security. They were instrumental in shutting down the election protests last year.
Who is the "they" you are referring to? Just to clarify, the Iranians themselves are claiming they hacked these sites, not the US.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
This still isn't a "cyberwar" this is just iran arresting human rights activists and calling them spies/traitor with a thin justification.
Anything governments try is still lost in the noise http://www.attrition.org/mirror/attrition/
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!!
Doesn't really matter, they could have been CIA fronts of they could have been genuine human rights stuff.
Either way the activists identified(or possibly spies) are going to be shot as traitors or spies.
Among other shady things we have been up to....
China (as well as Iran and Al-Jazeera) accused the US in state newspapers of using twitter to sow discord in Iran by creating accounts and distributing false information to get people whipped up during the protests. They even linked to a few of the particularly shady accounts that dont seem to really be people on the ground but gained thousands of followers by supplying news of people being shot in the street and leaders (falsely) being arrested.
It is no wonder that Iran and China have taken steps to limit the influence that the US can have in domestic affairs by simply creating a twitter troll account.
Information warfare on the web 2.0... Interesting stuff.
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Considering some (all?) were using Wordpress the hacking may have been trivial depending on what plugins were in use. (or perhaps there is an unknown issue with Wordpress it's self)
There may not have been that much expertise needed in this "hacking".
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:0KLjk6HUgUQJ:www.en-hrana.com/+EN-HRANA.COM&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
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.
Government related sites are hacked continously, it's just that only few stories actually arrive in "mainstream" media about it. .gov.X sites in the list: http://zone-h.org/archive/special=1
Have a look at the zone-h archive of defacements and note the number of
It is only Iran saying that they were spy websites. Seems like a improvised excuse to censor their own populace to me. Not that they need an excuse, but excuses decrease the amount of resulting discontent. Just using the word "because" in a request has been shown to dramatically boost acquiescence. As has been discussed before, the young educated Iranians that tend to be the ones protesting are quite tech aware on average, it wouldn't surprise me if they set the sites up entirely themselves with no prodding. Iran is just as embarrassed about 'amateurs' making their jobs difficult as the superpowers are I'd guess. "Oh no! The sheeple can write html! We are doomed!"
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
It was not clear whether HRAI had ties to US intelligence organisations or whether the Fars report labeled them as such due to their apparent sympathy for opposition protesters. The Fars report did not tie any of the websites to a specific US government entity.
This article seems shoddy to me, as these claims are as of yet unsubstantiated. Why doesn't Iran use its magic firewall to block these sites instead of hack them? Smells like a publicity stunt against to me.
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.
Most of these sites redirected to one site. But in all cases, they are minor sites run by random people, just like 1,000,000,000's of others on the Interwebs with negligable or non-existent "security". These are mostly "here today, gone tomorow" type web sites. This hardly qualifies as serious hacking of secure government-backed web sites.
This is what's called "propaganda".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why are all these government spy groups in China and Iran using traceable IP's? Why not just send their spy to any place in the EU or US with enough money to buy a laptop with a wireless connection and do their hacking by hopping on unencrypted wireless networks? It's like spy's are getting ultra lazy and sloppy. Like with the assasination in dubi a few weeks back. Why were the spys caught on camera? Didn't it dawn on them they they should have taken out the camera system to cover their tracks so that no one would know. Instead we have them playing James Bond in plain view of the camera. Espionage is about doing things that don't lead back to you and leaves doubt about who did it and why. Malicous Hacking tip 101 Don't use your own IP address to do any hacking.
FTFA:
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Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI). Information previously available on the site included a report on 400 Iranian opposition protesters that were arrested on 4 November, 2009, an Iranian holiday that marks the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, according to a cached version of the site.
It was not clear whether HRAI had ties to US intelligence organisations or whether the Fars report labeled them as such due to their apparent sympathy for opposition protesters. The Fars report did not tie any of the websites to a specific US government entity.
This is not the opening salvo of a cyber war you were looking for, move along.
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Its of course plausible that these were CIA fronts, but I'm going to go with "excuse to silence some critics", much like how they say every single one of the millions of protesters in Iran is a paid US operative dedicated to overthrowing the perfect religious dictatorship that no one would possibly be unhappy with.
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.
Mod parent informative please.
Just because Fars said it was a "us spy website" doesn't make it so, and in fact should lead one to believe it probably wasn't.
Never have I seen an article title more in need of the word "Alleged"
As in: Iran Hacks ALLEGED US Spy Sites
Like you are going to believe that "Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency" isn't going to make unsubstantiated claims? (I know double negative, but here it ain't wrong).
Perhaps you should read the article.
You are new here, right? Let me show you around...
At some point (I think we're already there) our computer infrastructure becomes so important to a nation that a cyber attack could be construed as an act of war. I wonder how long it will be before we see a physical military response to a cyber attack. We've already seen evidence that China attacked Google's corporate infrastructure a few months ago. Is this really all that dissimilar than Chinese agents coming to the US and physically breaking into Google's buildings? To relate things to the article, if it could be shown that Iran was indeed attacking CIA sites, would the US be justified in bombing Iranian intelligence facilities? Just some food for thought.