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.