Historical footnote: the original pic was photoshopped by Iran to cover a misfire.
Bombshell from Iran, on a couple of metaphorical levels: the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, everyone’s favorite bad guys these days, hacked a couple dozen web sites of human rights activists working in Iran, claiming they were agents for American intelligence services. In Farsi, “rights defender” apparently translates as “American spy”.
Then the regime’s increasingly brazen goons arrested 30 related citizens – names most likely taken from the compromised web sites.
The Iranian news agency is publicly bragging about their leet hax0r skillz.
If the report by ComputerWorldUK is correct – that http://hra-iran.org was one of the target sites – then things get veeery interesting. Let’s do some digging.
Hmm, if the current domain information was true a couple days ago – and it was updated today, so who knows – the site is owned by a guy out in Silver Spring, MD (Hi neighbor!) and is being hosted by SiteGround (“Multiple layers of network security!”) No, I haven’t heard of them either.
Well, SiteGround has their colocation facilities in a few locations – but all of them are definitely in the United States. Unless Texas managed to secede when I wasn’t paying attention.
If this is true, it looks like the Iranian cyber command is bragging that they hacked the servers of human rights activists hosted on computers based in the United States, managed by a fellow residing in the United States, and used the info to lock up political prisoners.
Huh.
