#iranian hackers

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Israel’s National Cyber Directorate (INCD) stated on Thursday that Iran is running a cyber campaign against members of the Israeli delegation arriving in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.

In its investigation, the INCD revealed that Iranian hackers have created social media channels and published personal information about the Israeli team members to send them threats. The INCD is working with the Cyber Unit of Israel’s State Attorney to shut them down. 

As part of their anti-Israeli campaign, the hackers reportedly pose as the French organization GUD. INCD authorities are continuing to coordinate both with the Israeli Olympic Committee and the Security and Emergency Department of the Culture and Sports Ministry to make sure that Israel’s athletes and other delegation members remain safe during the Paris international sports competition.

INCD Dir.-Gen. Gabi Portnoy said Iran was exploiting the Olympics to terrorize Israel.

“Iran is exploiting an apolitical international sporting competition to promote digital terrorism against Israel and its right to participate in these competitions,” he said.

Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar echoed Portnoy’s remarks. 

“We are witnessing attempts by the Iranian regime to intimidate Israeli athletes and carry out psychological terror against our amazing delegation. We are here in Paris, continuing with full force, and nothing will stop us,” he said.

“Our athletes are more prepared and determined than ever to achieve great results, and our security apparatus is ready for any scenario. We will not relent until we topple the Iranian regime,” Zohar added.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said on Thursday that while cyberattacks on the Paris Olympics are inevitable, France will do all it can to limit the effects of such attacks.

“We are a target. There will be cyberattacks. The key thing is to limit their impact,” Attal told reporters at the headquarters of France’s ANSSI software security agency.

In the meantime, Israeli tourists in Paris face escalating threats.

On Sunday, Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) advised Israeli nationals traveling to the Olympic Games in Paris to exercise increased caution due to anti-Israel threats, warning that it believes Iranian-backed terror organizations “are seeking to carry out attacks on Israeli/Jewish targets around the Olympics.”

Earlier this week, a masked man with a Palestinian Authority flag on his shirt threatened the "Zionist regime" participating in the Olympic Games, saying, “Rivers of blood will flow through the streets of Paris.”

Despite the threats, the Israeli delegation traveled to Paris on Monday with their heads held high and the support of the entire nation.

“We feel like emissaries of the State of Israel – our athletes, every one of them are here to achieve their dreams, but there is another layer, of a national mission,” the President of the Olympic Committee of Israel Yael Arad said ahead of the flight to France.

French authorities have reportedly dispatched around 1,000 elite anti-terrorist officers to provide security and a "ring of steel" for Israel’s Olympic athletes. The first competition involving Israelis, a soccer match between Israel and Mali on Wednesday, passed without major security incidents, despite the presence of anti-Israel activists who held Palestinian Authority flags and demonstrated against the Jewish state. Some activists wore “Free Palestine” t-shirts and booed when the Israeli national anthem, "HaTikva" (The Hope) was played before the game. Israeli players were also met with initial boos when they touched the ball during the game.

On Friday, despite heightened security, France suffered attacks targeting the country's train networks in what authorities described as "coordinated sabotage," including arson. No organization has claimed responsibility. The attacks are expected to negatively impact around 250,000 travelers today and 800,000 over the weekend.

[mcspocky]

Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist, has dropped a Trump campaign document that was breached by Iranian hackers on Substack.

[infinitemonkeytheory]

Donald Trump was once a cheerleader of publicizing hacked materials. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump said during a press conference in his 2016 presidential run, when Hillary Clinton’s deleted personal emails were a hot topic, “I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

“I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” he said back then.

That changed when Trump’s latest presidential campaign declared this weekend it had been hacked by Iran. “Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” Steven Cheung, the campaign’s communications director, said in a statement on Saturday announcing that the campaign had been hacked.

The campaign has not responded to questions about why its view on hacking changed, including a query on Monday from The Associated Press. But its new position is a striking change from 2016, when Trump heartily embraced the Russian hacking of his opponent Clinton’s aides and the Democratic National Committee.

The current hack, so far, is murky.

Google's Threat Analysis Group confirmed Wednesday that they observed a threat actor backed by the Iranian government targeting Google accounts associated with US presidential campaigns, in addition to stepped-up attacks on Israeli targets.

[satireinfo]

Did Iran Hack Trump’s Campaign?

Did Iran Hack Trump’s Campaign? A Satirical Investigation into Cyber Espionage and Covfefe   The Password Guessing Game: How Easy Was It? In the world of cyber espionage, one might expect a high-profile target like the Trump campaign to have state-of-the-art security. However, the Iranian hackers reportedly spent hours trying classic passwords like “password,” “12345,” and even “Trump2024!”…

[irishrebelvoice]

Kingdom Of Lies - Unnerving Adventures In The World Of Cybercrime, by Kate Fazzini

Kingdom Of Lies, Unnerving Adventures In The World Of Cybercrime by Kate Fazzini This book is supposed to be an exposé on what exactly takes place on the keyboards of the world. As the globe is connected, even to remote corners, via the internet (scary how quickly that happened), the potential for crimes committed via that medium is huge. Credit card scams, blackmail, political revelations,…

[creativemedianews]

Sweden Accuses Iran of Cyberattack Inciting Revenge for Quran Burnings

Sweden Accuses Iran of Cyberattack Inciting Revenge for Quran Burnings #Anzuteam #foreigninfluenceSweden

[digitalcreationsllc]

Iran's Peach Sandstorm Deploy FalseFont Backdoor in Defense Sector

In its latest campaign, Iranian state-backed hackers, Peach Sandstorm, employs FalseFont backdoor for intelligence gathering on behalf of the Iranian government. Cybersecurity researchers at Microsoft Threat Intelligence Unit have uncovered the latest activities of the Iranian nation-state actor Peach Sandstorm, also known as HOLMIUM. The group has been making efforts to deploy a newly developed…

[rudrjobdesk]

ZEE DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE: After AIIMS, now a big cyber attack on COWIN platform by hackers | Technology News

ZEE DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE: After AIIMS, now a big cyber attack on COWIN platform by hackers | Technology News

New Delhi: India is fighting a battle with the Chinese army on the border, while on the other hand the servers of India’s health sector are fighting with cyber terrorists. Just a few weeks had passed after the cyber attack on AIIMS Delhi, that now cyber terrorists have done a big cyber attack on COWIN platform. An Iranian hacker has posted on the Darkweb claiming that he has Admin Access i.e…

[thingstrumperssay]

Project 2025 training videos were leaked by an Iranian hacker.

Thank you, Iranian hacker!

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

The IDF has been releasing a lot of incriminating intel on the Shifa hospital in Gaza being used by Hamas. There's footage of a drone going into a terror tunnel underneath it.

There's pics of the weapons found there. There's the results of an investigation into the fate of 19 years old Noa Marziano, who was kidnapped by Hamas, lightly injured in an IDF strike, which killed the terrorist who was guarding her, another terrorist took her into the basement at the Shifa hospital, and killed her there, then Hamas tried to stage "evidence" that she was killed in the IDF strike. And most recently, there's CCTV footage showing Hamas bringing in hostages (one man from Nepal and one from Thailand) into Shifa, with the terrorists being armed, and all of this was done in broad daylight, and right in front of the medical staff.

Of course anti-Israelis, including the Hamas, said it was just bringing hostages in to get treatment.

But here's the thing, Shifa is on the Western side of Gaza, while Hamas breached the Israeli border in the east. On the way between the border and where this hospital is located, there are plenty of other medical facilities on the way. Any of them would be preferable if the goal was to give the hostages medical treatment as soon as possible. But they took these kidnapped men all the way to Shifa instead. Because that's Hamas' headquarters.

I've known for years, like most Israelis, that Hamas is using medical facilities like hospitals and ambulances for its terrorist activity. This evidence does not surprise me. But I think it didn't really sink in for me until yesterday, just how many people knew and kept silent. I'm not even talking about the Gazan medical staff. They live under the constant threat of Hamas, I don't blame them. But the UN, the Red Cross, all of those "noble" NGO's operating from Gaza (and getting a lot of donations to do so), all of those foreigners with access to Gaza, who knew the situation on the ground, and chose to lie, and continued to do so even after the Oct 7 massacre... WTF is wrong with these people? By keeping quiet, they endangered both Israeli civilians (who Hamas could continue to target with impunity when operating from inside medical facilities), and Palestinian ones that Hamas endangered by using them as human shields.

Who is going to hold these people accountable? Who is going to make them pay for their complicity in endangering so many people, millions altogether, on both sides of the border, so that they never dare do this again?

Have ANY of them come forward, apologized, taken responsibility for their long complicity? I've heard of no such thing. In fact, I assume that they will only raise the volume of their accusations against and vilification of Israel, to drown out the voices asking these questions.

In this tweet you can hear an interview (starting at around 35 seconds in) with one of the few foreign doctors, who had worked at the Shifa hospital, and who after Hamas' massacre, did not come forward with his testimony about what he'd seen and experienced while he was there, but did agree to have it recorded once he was asked to. If Hamas is finally taken down, we might get to hear more of these, and I guess... better late than never.

In the midst of all of this, Israel has helped evacuate babies from the Shifa hospital to ones in Egypt, and the equipment to established a second Jordanian field hospital has entered Gaza today.

Israel continues to be attacked by Iran-funded rockets from the south, from the north by Iran-funded Hezbollah, as well as from Syria, by the Iran-funded Houthis in Yemen, by independent terrorist attacks, and online from cyber attacks, by Iran-funded and even Iranian hackers. I kind of tend not to talk about these that much, because they're on going. It's happening every single day, and Israel, in the middle of the fight to destroy Hamas, has to also defend its people on these fronts.

The anger and hurt over the denial of rapes that happened as part of Hamas' massacre continues, and more people are trying to speak up against it:

This is 15 years old Itay Cohen.

He's a triathlete, and was in the middle of a training session, cycling in the south, when Hamas terrorists shot him. He was taken to a hospital without any family by his side, because his parents were locked inside a bomb shelter in their kibbutz. Itay took a bullet to the head, and lost his eyesight, but somehow survived. So did his parents. He vowed he won't stop training, despite his new disability. This terror attack has changed countless lives, from among the survivors as well.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[girlactionfigure]

🔅Monday afternoon - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

🔻ATTACK - DRONES - from Hezbollah - north west border towns: Idmit, Eilon, Goren, Gornot HaGalil, Hanita, Ya'ara, Arab al-Aramshe 

🔻IRAN WARNS.. Al Jazeera: Tehran sent a new message to the US through Turkey after the attack on Israel yesterday. An "important and unprecedented" warning message was also sent to Israel via Cairo referring to the fact that there will be an Iranian response to any new "bold act" on Israel's part.

🔻DID BIDEN GIVE IRAN PERMISSION TO HIT ISRAEL?  (Maybe Fake)  “Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters, adding that Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Ankara that any action it took had to be "within certain limits.””

(( This is possibly FAKE NEWS. It is on many sites and channels, on some is quoted in the name of Reuters, but I can’t find an actual source. ))

🔻ISRAEL RESPONSE (PLANNING).. Israeli sources to CNN: The War Cabinet is determined to respond to the Iranian attack, and is discussing the timing and extent of the response.

Commander of the Home Front Command: "We are in a long war and there may be changes in the coming days in light of the situation assessment. Continue to listen and act according to the instructions - they save lives.”

▪️BOMB ON THE LEBANESE BORDER.. injures 4 soldiers. Hezbollah takes responsibility.

▪️ATTEMPTED TERROR.. at the Deir Sharaf intersection in Samaria: a female terrorist armed with a knife arrived at the soldiers' position at the intersection, who opened fire on her in a suspicious arrest procedure, and she was arrested.  

▪️AIR TRAVEL.. EasyJet and Air India suspend flights to Israel.  Travelers to and from Israel are struggling to find options.

▪️BETTER FOOD FOR TERRORISTS!  The "Association for Civil Rights in Israel" filed a petition with the High Court of Justice against the Minister of National Security as well as against the Israeli Security Service Commissioner, following the reduction of conditions of the Arab convicted prisoners since the outbreak of the war in accordance with the policy of Minister Ben Gvir.

As part of the petition they demand that the court issue a conditional order to the Israeli Security Service to explain why the Arab terrorists, including those who committed the most horrific acts humanly possible, are not given higher quality food and the possibility to buy food (the prison canteen) like criminal prisoners.

▪️ISRAELI HACKERS.. “We launched a broad attack on cellphone systems in Iran and over 20 million telephones received SMS messages, that they must be prepared for war in the coming hours.  The Iranians felt the  pressure and started withdrawing money from the banks which put the authorities in Iran under pressure.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

For weeks, major American media organizations — including The Washington Post, Politico, and the New York Times — have possessed internal Trump campaign documents. What do these documents say? We don't know because all three outlets have declined to publish the documents — or excerpt a single sentence.  None of the outlets even acknowledged that they had been sent the internal documents until after the Trump campaign publicized that it had been hacked by the Iranian government. Little has been revealed about the topics covered in the documents other than that they include a dossier exploring the vulnerabilities of Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), who former President Donald Trump chose as his running mate. 

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung demanded the media keep the internal documents secret. "[A]ny media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want," Cheung said in an August 10 statement.  Over the weekend, U.S. intelligence officials "acknowledged for the first time that the Iranian government was behind not only the hack of the Trump campaign revealed last month but also the leak of internal campaign documents." The acknowledgment was consistent with an August 8 press release from Microsoft, which did not name the Trump campaign, warning of operations by the Iranian government "designed to gain intelligence on political campaigns."

Washington Post Executive Editor Matt Murray defended the decision of the Washington Post and other outlets not to publish the leaked internal Trump campaign documents. "[A]ll of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not," Murray said in a statement to a Washington Post reporter. This is a much different approach than the Washington Post took after hackers connected to the Russian government leaked internal emails from Clinton campaign officials and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The Washington Post published dozens of stories based on these leaked emails. The steady drumbeat of mostly unflattering articles was a major part of the election narrative in the days and weeks before election day. 

[...]

Of course, the Washington Post, Politico, and the New York Times may believe they made a mistake in covering the hacked emails in 2016 and are now changing course. But none of these publications have acknowledged any errors in their 2016 coverage or acknowledged that they are taking a radically different approach to leaked internal Trump campaign documents in 2024. 

In any event, Trump is an odd beneficiary for the media's change of heart on hacked campaign materials. On July 26, 2016, Trump publicly implored Russia to acquire Hillary Clinton's internal emails, promising that the media would amplify them. "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," Trump said. (It was later revealed that Russia began targeting Clinton campaign officials "on or around" the same day.)  When Wikileaks began leaking the emails acquired by Russian hackers, Trump celebrated. He publicly mentioned WikiLeaks 141 times in the month before the election. "WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks," Trump told a crowd in Pennsylvania on October 10. A few weeks later, he won the state by less than 50,000 votes, propelling him to the White House.

When hacked emails against Hillary Clinton were in the news in 2016, news outlets dutifully reported on them.

In 2024, with reports that multiple news organizations are sitting on leaked Trump campaign documents, several media outlets instead chose to protect Donald Trump by refusing to report on the leaks.

This is further proof that the MSM wants the Orange Fascist back in office. Vote Harris/Walz to defeat the RW Media/MSM alliance!

[mariacallous]

The public got a peek into the inner workings of the Trump campaign last week, when the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein did what major news outlets refused to: he published the opposition research dossier on JD Vance’s electoral vulnerabilities that was written by the Trump campaign in the lead-up to the VP announcement.

The dossier, which was obtained in a hack thought to have been perpetrated by Iranian state interests, would have been compiled by Donald Trump’s camp as part of a routine vetting process as the Republican campaign surveilled possible VP picks and assessed their strengths and weaknesses. It is thorough: at 271 pages, it contains a robust and factual accounting of the vice-presidential candidate’s public statements and associations going back years. As such, it offers a unique perspective into how the Trump campaign views the race – and how they understand the controversial man who is now in their No 2 spot.

But the document, a litany of everything the Trump camp thinks is wrong with Vance, is maybe most revealing for what it omits: there is almost nothing about his comments on women, and nothing at all about his extensive, repeated and impassioned hatred for childless women, including the “cat ladies” comment that has been Vance’s stickiest scandal and perhaps his greatest contribution to the campaign thus far. The comments that provoked the ire of thousands of women – including no less influential a figure than Taylor Swift – and turned the race partly into a referendum on the purpose and value of women’s lives were nowhere to be found in the document.

Instead, the dossier was largely focused on comments by Vance that make him vulnerable with an audience of one: that is, his past negative statements about Trump.

The mainstream news organizations that declined to publish this hacked document justified this decision by saying that much of the information was not newsworthy. If this is their standard, it seems to be a new one: in 2016, when Russian-backed hackers obtained emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, one of the disclosures included risotto cooking tips from campaign chair John Podesta. (He says that adding the liquid slowly helps the rice become creamier, in case you’re interested.) But the Vance dossier is newsworthy, though not because of what it reveals about Vance. What the document says about Vance himself is largely a matter of public record. What is newsworthy, instead, is what the document exposes about the Trump campaign’s priorities.

The dossier concerns many worries that Vance is not conservative enough. It also seems preoccupied with how the Ohio senator has wounded Trump’s ego. The absence of Vance’s extreme gender views from the document suggests that the Trump campaign did not understand his comments on women to even be controversial: they don’t seem to have thought that it would come up.

Maybe the Trump campaign is staffed with people, including the apparatchiks who do its vetting, who have so little exposure to feminism (or, perhaps, to women more broadly) that it simply did not occur to them that anyone would find Vance’s ravings about women offensive. Maybe the Trump camp made the calculation – one certainly not exclusive to the political right – that women’s investment in their own rights is partial and unserious, and that they would not be moved by gendered insults to their dignity in anything like meaningful numbers. Maybe they assumed that gender politics is now a man’s game, and that appeals to masculine woundedness and grievance now carry much more sway than appeals to women’s rights do. If this is what they think – that misogyny can be an asset for them but never a liability – it would certainly explain some of their actions.

But the salience of the comments also signals something else that has changed this election: Trump no longer solely sets the terms of the conversation. Trump’s ability to command attention and to dictate the news cycle has noticeably waned this term – think, for instance, of how quickly and decisively each of his not one but two assassination attempts disappeared from the front pages, and how little an impact they seem to have ultimately had on his support. Trump has been unable to get a nickname to stick to Kamala; he has been unsuccessful in his efforts to generate vulgar distractions about her sexual history or the authenticity of her racial identity.

So far, all he has managed to do is spread lurid and racist lies that have made life hell for the residents of Springfield, Ohio. Trump’s vulgarity, his hysterics, his domineering indifference to the truth – all these used to fascinate voters, or at least the national media. But Trump has lost his juice.

Which brings us to the other reason why the dossier may not have contained many of Vance’s most potent vulnerabilities: perhaps Trump’s staff overlooked them because they assumed that they would be able to generate the narrative on their own, assuming that it was they, and they alone, who would dictate what the media covered and what the public cared about. Those days are over. Just ask your local cat lady.

[lasseling]

FBI Reveals Iran Hacked Trump Campaign and Gave Stolen Information to Biden/Harris

The AP is reporting that the FBI has uncovered evidence that Iranian hackers stole materials from the Trump campaign in the Summer and provided them to what was then the Biden/Harris campaign.

[eretzyisrael]

By Richard Pollina

The horrific shows of antisemitism come as French police have launched an investigation into death threats received by three Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games, according to Sky News.

Security concerns for the Israeli team remain a significant priority for Olympic organizers as the nation is weeks away from marking 10 months of war against Hamas.

Israeli athletes in Paris are being escorted to and from events by elite tactical units and have been given 24-hour protection, officials told Sky News.

Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, is also assisting with security for their countrymen and other Israeli diplomats attending the games.

7Israel’s supporters wave flags in the men’s group D football match between Israel and Paraguay during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Parc des Princes in Paris on July 27, 2024.AFP via Getty Images

Shin Bet is said to have “total support for the measures that are being taken by the French authorities,” a source told the outlet.

“This sends an important message to individuals and organizations attempting to threaten athletes,” the source added.

To ensure the safety of every country participating in the Olympics, France is deploying 35,000 officers each day, and 45,000 were deployed for the opening ceremonies.

France also receives help from 40 countries that have sent nearly 2,000 reinforcements.

On Thursday, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate said it discovered Iranian hackers were creating fake social media channels to publish personal information about members of the Israeli delegation at the Paris Olympics and were sending them threatening messages, according to Ynet News.

That same day, Israel’s foreign minister warned his French counterpart of a potential Iranian-backed plot to target Israeli athletes and tourists during the Games.

In response to the claims, the Iranian mission to the United Nations said in a statement that “Terrorist acts have no place in the principles of resistance groups; lies and deceit cannot switch the roles of the plaintiff and the accused.”

Israeli athletes have been the target of terrorist attacks during the Olympic Games in the past.

Eleven Israeli athletes and a German police officer were killed by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games.