Anonymous hits Iranian state sites

Saturday 24 September 2022

Cyber attacks against the Iranian government for #OpIran.

In the wake of the recent Iranian government crackdown on dissent after Mahsa Amini’s death, the international hacktivist group Anonymous has launched a new operation against the country’s online infrastructure.

Dubbed OpIran (Operation Iran) by Anonymous; the hacktivists have taken down a number of top government websites and hacked over 300 security cameras in different parts of the country.

What Happened to Mahsa Amini?

It is worth noting that on September 16th, 2022, a 22-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died in Tehran, Iran, under Police custody. Amini was arrested for failure to follow government-mandated forms of the Hijab.

On the other hand, authorities claim Amini died of natural causes after suffering heart failure at the police station. However, Iranians have rejected the official explanation and have taken their protests (Mahsa Amini protests (aka September 2022 Iranian protests) to the streets.

Anonymous Stands with Protestors in Iran.

On Twitter, @YourAnonNews, one of the largest social media representatives of the Anonymous movement, and several other popular Anonymous handles have confirmed their support for Iranian protesters. Thus the recent cyber attacks were carried out under the banner of OpIran.

According to Anonymous, the modus operandi of OpIran involves DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service attacks), data breaches, social engineering attacks, quick tutorials on how to beat state censorship by using the Tor browser, and evading arrests by police.

Anonymous Hacks Iran’s Forensic Research Center.

The first major Iranian government institution to suffer a cyberattack from Anonymous hackers is its Forensic Research Center. As seen by Hackread.com, Anonymous managed to successfully deface its domains and leak a database containing 100MB worth of data. According to Hackread.com’s analysis, the data contains names, email addresses, logs including IP addresses of the Center’s site visitors worldwide.

Anonymous hacked 300 Iranian CCTV cameras.

Although Anonymous is famous for its large-scale DDoS attacks and data breaches (the group proved its point during OpRussia during Ukraine and Russia conflict), lately, they have been going a step further by hitting the vulnerable IoT infrastructure in the targeted country.

In the case of Russia, as reported by Hackread.com, Anonymous managed to hack over 400 security cameras across the country while sending almost 10 million texts to Russian citizens to raise awareness about the conflict. In the latest, Anonymous has claimed to have compromised 300 security camera installations by exploiting a 5.4 severity score vulnerability.

— Hackread.com

OpIran