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."

Spy Websites?!?

[nullhero]

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.

Because US was using twitter as a weapon...?

[ihatewinXP]

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.

Wordpress and/or plugin security issues?

[dclozier]

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".

[74.125.95.132]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 [74.125.95.132]

Worst summary ever

[DJ Jones]

• A website is a passive entity that serves content; there's no such thing as a proactive-espionage-"attack" website. Grow up.
• They were Iranian human rights websites. The article says (in quotes) that the Fars news network drew a tie to US intelligence with no details to back up that claim.
• Fars news somehow linked this incident to other US funded groups that were arrested on a different occasion? with no citation.

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.

Flimsy excuse.

[nten]

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!"

Re:Not 29 Web Sites

[Critical Facilities]

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.

Softhack

[nten]

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.

I don't get these hacks

[medv4380]

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.

Re:Amazing

[HungryHobo]

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.

Re:Spy Websites?!?

[HungryHobo]

I'm still thinking stenography over commonly used channels is still the least conspicuous way.
I've spent the last few months working on a project that looks for manipulations in images and while it is possible to spot that some kind of stenographic message has been hidden in an image it's essentially impossible to differentiate between stenography and light manipulation(such as with photoshop or any tool which can blur/sharpen an image).
At the very least they'd need a bank of computers the size of the moon to scan every image going in and out of the country for that kind of thing and the false positive rate.... well...

Now given that the NSA has enough cryptographers to run rings around anything I can think of off the top of my head. At the very least I imagine they'd have a better system than logging on to a special website.

Re:you mean "ALLEGED"

[GuruBuckaroo]

Not to mention "Claims". Proper headline, knowing where this article comes from, should be:

Iran Claims it has hacked Alleged US Spy Sites

Geez. This is like people believing the USSR's Pravda back in the Cold War.

Re:Worst summary ever

[sjames]

I didn't say Fox is the only biased and inaccurate news out there. They're pretty much all screwed up one way or another. Fox just happens to be less subtle about it than some of the others. In the case of news that has no political spin value, they'll all spin it as sensational even if it's a non event.

For example, Mir's gyrodynes failed, so it was rotating once every 90 minutes with respect to Earth. If it was critical, they could have used thrusters to correct it, but it wasn't worth the fuel. CNN called it "spinning wildly out of control".

When does hacking become an act of war?

[Japher]

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.