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Game of Thrones Hacker Worked With US Defector To Hack Air Force Employees of Iran (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The U.S. Department of Justice unsealed today espionage-related charges against a former U.S. Air Force service member who defected to Iran and helped the country's hackers target her former Air Force colleagues. Besides charges and an arrest warrant issued in the name of the former USAF service member, the DOJ also indicted four Iranian hackers who supposedly carried out the cyber-attacks acting on information provided by Witt. The most notable of the four Iranian hackers is Behzad Mesri, who U.S. authorities also charged in November 2017 with hacking HBO, stealing scripts for unaired episodes of season 6 of the hit series Game Of Thrones TV show, and later attempting to extort HBO execs for $6 million.

But at the heart of today's indictment stands Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, a former US Air Force counter-intelligence special agent specialized in Middle East operations, who served for the Air Force between 1997 and 2008, and later worked as a DOD contractor until 2010 --including for Booz Allen Hamilton, the same defense company where Edward Snowden worked. [...] The DOJ claims Witt has been working ever since with IRGC hacking units to craft and fine-tune cyber-operations against her former Air Force colleagues, some of whom she knew personally. [...] All the five suspects named in the indictment are still at large, believed to be located in Iran. The DOJ says Witt now goes by the names of Fatemah Zahra or Narges Witt.

3 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What is with these guys using 2 different names by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    You mean Booz Allen Hamilton?

  2. Re: Leading summary with GoT by youngone · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hate fuckin' millenials too. Strutting around like they rent the place.

  3. Re:These could be covers. by hey! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What I think is interesting is to compare her Air Force service photo to the photo of her circulating in the news stories. She is a Texan of German extraction, and in her service portraits he looks white. In the photo used in the news stories she is wearing a hijab and is very brown.

    I find this strange. There are a dozen or so ethnic groups in Iran, some of whom are dark-skinned, some of whom are about the same color as this woman. Tehran has about the same latitude as Oklahoma city, so if she was brought in Texas and had the genetics to turn brown while living in Iran, she ought to have been brown all her life.

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