Iran Hacks US Spy Sites 149
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."
Not that I put a lot of trust in *our* reports (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not that I put a lot of trust in *our* reports (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not that I put a lot of trust in *our* reports (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nice headline. These idiots make it sound like the Basji took down the firewalls at Langley and laid waste to the CIA's cyberwar infrastructure. More appropriate headline: "Iranian script kiddies take down website; blame US".
Well it is called the "Farce News Agency."
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Re:Not that I put a lot of trust in *our* reports (Score:5, Insightful)
An even more accurate headline: "Iranian government takes down human rights websites, accusing them of 'espionage'."
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Wrong. You got no proof that they are human rights websites.
You actually don’t even have proof that the whole thing happened at all.
You don’t have proof that Iran exists.
And you don’t have proof that anything, except for yourself, exists at all. ^^
Really. Try.
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Also, it ignores that hacking the website is not the same as hacking internal stuff. The classified internet stuff wasn't touched. They might have made KFC.com say "Burger King ruels! LOLOLOL", but they didn't find the secret ingredient that makes you crave chicken fornightly.
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Not 29 Web Sites (Score:1)
Re:Not 29 Web Sites (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not 29 Web Sites (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Spy Websites?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Any serious spies are going to communicate through some deniable,encrypted,stenographic channel so my money is on these poor fuckers being genuine human rights activists who are just going to be called spies and shot.
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Yup, the real spies probably post pro-government spam with embedded code on common websites if they need to use the web at all. They're more likely to avoid any channel that passes through government control - a dead drop picked up by some guy who hands off to a foreign diplomat is going to be hard to spot. Once the data is in an embassy it can leave the country in any number of ways that are just about impossible to intercept.
They're not going to do anything that makes themselves stand out, like visit so
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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
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you're a bit late to the game.
Someone bellow already caught that one.
Re:Spy Websites?!? (Score:5, Informative)
They were only U.S. spy sites in the sense that officially no right thinking Iranian would be against the government, so it would have to be a CIA plot Q.E.D.
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Any serious spies are going to communicate through some deniable,encrypted,stenographic channel so my money is on these poor fuckers being genuine human rights activists who are just going to be called spies and shot.
I think you meant steganographic there. Stenography is shorthand, steganography is hiding content in ways that hide the fact that there is hidden content at all.
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I stand corrected.
Cheers
Flimsy excuse. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 prod
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What they actually mean here is "websites that support our dissidents". Which may well be true, and it still doesn't make it wrong or criminal.
It's the exact same thing in Russia. Pretty much all human rights organizations are blamed to be "CIA fronts" with the purpose of "destabilizing the country" via criticism of the government.
Re:Spy Websites?!? (Score:4, Informative)
What they're talking about websites that are critical of human rights in Iran. Their contention is that all the bad news about Iran is a western psy-ops ploy.
Calling such sites "spy websites" is not an oxymoron by any means. Spying isn't just about getting information; it's about planting disinformation too.
The domains they are targeting mostly belong to one "KEYVAN RAFIEE", with a contact address in a small suburban condo building in Silver Spring MD. It is also the same address used for a small media production company. Some of the domains under that name have as contract address a private home in Woodland CA.
Overall, this not inconsistent with this Mr. Rafiee being a private human rights activist, nor with him being a frontman for a US intelligence operation.
That said, the most credible explanation is this is just disinformation on Iran's part. We've all seen the riots, which were definitely not staged. We've all heard the pronouncements of Mr. Ahmadinejad, which stink of propaganda. This does not mean *we* don't have our own propaganda, but it's clear that the Iranian government would try to portray any criticism as being from the CIA, especially given the CIA's unfortunate history in that country.
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I think you are missing the point here. What is more plausible? The idea that these were connected to the US and we were just being OMGLOLSTOOPED and left the sites vulnerable, or that these were in fact controlled by Iran and this is all just Propaganda to help justify their position. What's really sad is how many people seem to believe that Iran is somehow capable of performing cyberattacks against legitimate CIA systems. Guarantee you, these sites have no real connection to US Intelligence, and if th
Because US was using twitter as a weapon...? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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There is no cyberwar but there is certainly a PR war.
Good point. (Score:2)
Does anyone remember during our own elections where people would forward emails to all their friends quoting quoting quoting quoting some email with less-than-100%-factual claims from someone you've never heard of before?
Was that a cyberwar?
No, that was PR and the medium was email.
Just because something you don't like somehow touches the Internet does NOT make it a "cyberwar".
Softhack (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Wordpress and/or plugin security issues? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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As much as I dislike fars news comparing them to Fox News is just not fair.
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Hey Mr. Beck, how did you know it was me?! I guess our biases show. Things are going great over here. We killed another 500-1000 students today I think? I can't remember.. I usually stop counting after the first few hundred! Also we took down 12 US spy satellites, had a successful launch of a ICBM, and hacked into 142 websites run by US and Israel zionist spies. All in all I would say it was a great day.
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Re:Worst summary ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Fox also decides what the news is rather than reporting it. They just happen to be attached to the Republican party rather than to the government in general.
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Well, after I watch a little Fox...I try to then watch a little MSNBC to try to balance things out a bit...they're every bit as antagonistic to the right as Fox is to the left.
I mean, have you actually watched Keith Olbermann for any length of time? He spews as much vitriol as any right-winger I've ever seen on Fox...hell, he may actually get a bit
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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
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It's called selling advertising, and all of the news networks will spin things as sensational in order to continue to get the advertisers to buy spots. If you follow the out of control space vessel continuously for like two hours, that's two hours worth of news + ad spots that you will see. Hence, if it was just all "Well, the space vessel is spinning but we're hearing it's okay nothing to worry about here" then of course you won't be watching for two hours straight and the advertisers are all like "OMGWT
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Of course they do it for the cash. The question is how far they'll go for the cash.
Many news agencies these days are just like a cheap hooker. Like the cheap hooker, I prefer to stay away from them so I don't catch anything (amongst other reasons).
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It just makes me laugh when I hear all of these people and their conspiracy theories about how *Insert Network Name Here* is in *Insert Political Party Here*'s pocket. They are in the pockets of stockholders and advertisers. The slant they provide is just a means of gaining *Insert Demographic Here*'s viewership in order to sell advertising.
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There's a vast area between simple reporting fact and making it all up. That is based on how stories are emphasized, buried in the details, or just not reported, and how you spin it. Fox isn't as close to the just reporting the facts side as I would like (nor are many others).
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It's amazing how much reality distortion can be created just by being selective in what is reported and what spin is put on it. "Man kills Seven in shootout" (While ducking to avoid a crossfire in a shootout the man stepped on some ants) or "LEAK DISCOVERED AT NUCLEAR PLANT" (in a toilet located in the administrative building).
That's the problem, some (these days, most) news organizations don't just pick and choose just the stories, but what facts related to the stories that they report.
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um, where have you been? I can create a website that attacks people, in fact many exists. How many bot nets are running on servers?
I can write a script to begin an attack at a certain time or event.
Not very impressive.. (Score:3, Informative)
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 [zone-h.org]
Have a look at the zone-h archive of defacements and note the number of
If the sites really were "hacked" . . . (Score:2)
Bad Article Title (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Bad Article Title (Score:5, Insightful)
The Iranian Government has been desperate to tie the current protests to US involvement. Without that connection they are beating up their own people, with the connection they are stopping "the great satan" from interfering in their internal affairs. I don't know why this surprises anyone, they put people to death a few weeks ago by saying they were working for the west. They are desperate to convince their own public that these election protests have been orchestrated by the US, in fact I would go so far as to say that the more paranoid members of their government are convinced of such and will do anything including manufacturing evidence of such to convince the general public they are right.
If these protests are all internally comprised they are no better than the shah, and regardless of how they feel about things they don't want to have themselves compared to him. They greatly fear that what happened to the shah could happen to them, they must convince everyone that the US is involved so they justify their own repressive actions.
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I have very little doubt that the West was/is involved in whipping up the protests in Iran h
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Peppered [salon.com] with quotes [salon.com] attributed to [salon.com] anonymous [salon.com], unnamed sources [salon.com].
I don't see the practical difference between a lack of quotation marks and a lack of sources. Both are so prone to bullshit as to be worthless.
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A terrible story with a terrible summary on the font page of Slashdot.
So what else is new?
Really I tend to give the slashdot some slack but this is just terrible. I mean really what are they thinking. And yes I know CW posted this trash but Slashdot doesn't have to repeat it.
Tariq Aziz School of Public Relations (Score:1)
Obviously these loons have attended the Tariq Aziz School of Public Relations.
I don't get these hacks (Score:2, Interesting)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
What he said. Do you really think Israeli Intelligence was behind the Dubai Assassination? The Israeli Intelligence people are damn good at what they do. A likely scenario is it was done as a false flag by someone like Iran to implicate Israel and put them in a bad light. Could be wrong, but then again, when Israel Intelligence does something, you usually never hear about it. I don't think they'd do something as amateurish as forget about surveillance during a critical op.
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I'm pretty sure it was sloppy on purpose. Hence the reference to False Flag
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Never said they never screw up. I just can't picture them being so amateurish that they would make such a simple blunder. However, being the geek that I am, that link contains two names of interest to me. Michael Dorf and Jean-Luc Sevenier..OMG, Worf and Capt. Picard should've changed their names to better protect their identities. I mean seriously, changing your last name or just a letter in your name won't make people not notice it. I'm sure the ridges on Worf's forehead was also a dead giveaway.
Honeypot? (Score:2)
If the CIA creates a bunch of generic Human Rights websites (read: Honeypot), and Iran hacks them, can the US gov't via the United Nations or Fox News or whatever basically start telling the world that Iran as a gov't is hacking websites?
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If the CIA creates a bunch of generic Human Rights websites (read: Honeypot), and Iran hacks them, can the US gov't via the United Nations or Fox News or whatever basically start telling the world that Iran as a gov't is hacking websites?
It would seem they don't need to. The Iranian government seems to be quite happy to tell the world they've done it.
Outsource that problem to the groups here (Score:2)
in this link on the left menu list http://www.keygenmusic.net/?lang=en [keygenmusic.net]
they will set iran government straight if they have the motivation to. after all this is a valid case of freedom - people vs tyrants.
btw site compiles keygen musics. top 100 list really worth listening to.
When does hacking become an act of war? (Score:2, Interesting)
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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?
No, because in the highly unlikely case that these were actually CIA sites, they would have been clandestine sites posing as legitimate human rights sites.
You don't go to war over someone hacking your clandestine intelligence front sites any more than you would go to war over someone capturing one of your spies. You just write off the asset (or
What's good for goose is good for gander (Score:2)
Since Iran's government sees hacking US websites as a legitimate activity, I take it that they don't mind either NSA folks or grassroot democracy enthusiasts hacking details of Iranian presidential security or nuclear reactor controls.
Hey Akbar! (Score:2)
I can see my house from here!
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awww I read it as "Iran Hacks US Spy Sats"
was a way more funny post then
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Yeah except he isn't even close to right, as anyone who bothered to read past even just the headline can see.
Human rights websites Iran claims were U.S. intelligence agency fronts != U.S. intelligence agency websites.
I think the scariest thing in all this isn't the possibility that he's right, it's the possibility that someone with his complete absence of critical thinking skills could actually be an intelligence analyst. Of course, he's no more an analyst than every website Iran doesn't like is a CIA fron
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [attrition.org]
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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. Th
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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.
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That would, if it were true. But just because the Iranians claim to have hacked US CIA sites doesn't mean they did. The Iranians are currently at war with themselves and the only way that the current power base will win is if they can demonize the other side by saying it is a CIA planned/supported plot.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Or would you call Western countries economical stranglehold on poorer countries for "economical war"?
That one really has a lot more claim to the title "war" than someone cracking a database server or two.
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It's a website. Not a war. (Score:2)
And they were right to do that. A sysadmin knows the difference between a website and a war. Websites are cracked all the time by script kiddies. Websites are shut down all the time by lawyers.
Who cares? All this does is attract MORE attention to whatever content those websites were hosting.
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Yes, it is truly amazing how last week you didn't know what you're talking about, and this week you still don't. Wait, that's completely un-amazing.
No, what's amazing is how happily you'll believe the very people who would be our alleged enemies in this alleged cyberwar because it supports your thesis.
Did you even read past the headline that the sites brought down were Iranian human rights web sites, alleged by Iran to be "affiliated with U.S. espionage services"? Yeah, and all the Green Revolution protes
Re:When are they (Score:5, Informative)
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Your original statement implies that the US has claimed it was attacked by Iran, when in fact the perpetrators are likely someone else. That is not the case. The Iranian government is claiming it attacked these websites because of alleged US espionage.
Also, let me clarify my original reply. By "the Iranians themselves", I meant "the Iranian government". Second, the government and their controlled media outlets may not be particularly trustworthy, but it's obvious that this was a release sanctioned by
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Perhaps you should read the article.
You are new here, right? Let me show you around...
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Good point. Although I'd think considering you have a six digit UID that you'd understand by now that telling /.ers to RTFA is about as hopeless as asking them to not have knee-jerk reactions.
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First it was the North Koreans and it turned out to be some random idiots. Then it was the Chinese, and again it turned out to be some random idiots. Now it's the Iranians... three guesses as to who is REALLY responsible for THIS new "attack"?
Well, the Iranians say it was the Iranians.
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Well, the Iranians say it was the Iranians.
Unless you have connections over there, you'll never really know.
It would be almost infinitely funny if it was actually 4channers saying they were Iranians saying it was the Iranians.
Or even better, slashdotters saying they're 4channers saying they're Iranians saying it was the Iranians. Not that I'm admitting anything. I think we can fit "The Onion" in there somewhere too.
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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".
you mean "ALLEGED" (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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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.
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"There is no goatse in Iran" - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
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Yes, I'm sure that ComputerWorld-UK is really an extension of the American military-industrial-complex. Maybe they're even owned by the Reptilian Overlords. Definitely propaganda either way. What do you suggest, Adolf? We can't let them spread propaganda which we don't like! Shall we round 'em up and turn 'em into soap?
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"Why are you godwinning me"
Well - uhhhmm - errr - have you actually looked at your nick, lately? Is Adolph a popular name where you come from? Personally, I've never met an Adolph in my life. There's only one whose life I'm familiar with. Godwinned? You probably get that all the time, don't you?
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Taco, you motherfucking tool, you are pushing your own people to yet another unwinnable war for oil onto innocent [guardian.co.uk] people!
shame on you, fuck!
Oh yeah, the Iranians themselves [archive.org] are the embodiment of innocence [archive.org]... (I strongly recommend you to check the TLDs again.)
Damn, no troll points left (Score:2)
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It doesn't help to further your point. Just makes you look immature.
You must be new here. Welcome to /.
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If we could destabilize Iran with only $400 Million, then perhaps we are moving towards being more fiscally responsible. That one sentence completely destroys the credibility of the entire article. They should've changed the 'M' to a 'B' if they wanted anyone to believe it.