Iran cyber cops nab hacker who targeted Israeli sites

Suspect tells police he hacked into Israeli, US websites out of curiosity and to show that Israel was weak in terms of cyber defense.

By JOANNA PARASZCZUK
Cyber defense war room 370 (photo credit: Reuters and Marc Israel Sellem)
Cyber defense war room 370
(photo credit: Reuters and Marc Israel Sellem)
Iran’s cyber police have arrested a man suspected of hacking into Iranian and foreign websites, including Israeli ones, the Iranian news site Tabnak reported on Monday.
The suspect told police he had hacked into Israeli and US websites out of curiosity and to show that Israel was weak in terms of cyber defense, according to Tabnak.
The suspect also allegedly targeted Iran’s state media.
South Khorasan’s cyber police chief Col. Gholamreza Hosseini said the suspect admitted hacking the website of Iran’s state TV network IRIB, as an expression of his support for earthquake victims in the eastern Azerbaijan province.
The suspect was detained after officers from the South Khorasan cyber police came across a website that included hacker training material and traced it to a 21-year-old computer science student from the city of Birjand. Further investigations on Facebook also led police to the suspect, according to Tabnak – a conservative website close to former IRGC chief Mohsen Rezaee.
Facebook is blocked in Iran, but Iranians still manage to access it using proxies and virtual private networks.
In September, Iran’s Press TV reported that a group called the DataCoders Security Team had hacked 370 Israeli sites, and last year a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army hacked websites such as the Voice of America.