US computing big Microsoft mentioned Friday that it had recognized Iranian state actors as these behind the current cyberattack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Clint Watts, the overall supervisor of Microsoft‘s Digital Risk Evaluation Middle, mentioned that the hackers, who known as themselves “Holy Souls,” have been Iranian cybersecurity agency Emennet Pasargad.
In early January, Holy Souls introduced that they had obtained the non-public info of greater than 200,000 Charlie Hebdo clients, and revealed a pattern of the info as proof.
The cyberattack got here after Charlie Hebdo revealed cartoons of Iranian supreme chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a particular version to mark the anniversary of the 2015 assault on its Paris places of work that left 12 useless.
Iran issued an official warning to France over the “insulting and indecent” cartoons.
Emennet Pasargad was the employer of two Iranians, Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazemi and Sajjad Kashian, who have been indicted by america Justice Division in November 2021.
They allegedly performed a cyber marketing campaign “to intimidate and affect American voters, and in any other case undermine voter confidence and sow discord” throughout the 2020 US presidential election.
Kazemi and Kashian allegedly obtained confidential voter info and despatched menacing emails, pushing out false info to affect each Democratic and Republican voters, and tried to hack into state voting-related web sites, the division mentioned.
The Charlie Hebdo hackers, whose operation Microsoft dubbed “Neptunium”, supplied the stolen subscriber database on the market on-line for 20 bitcoin, at present about $460,000 (practically Rs. 3.80 crore), Microsoft mentioned.
“No matter one might consider Charlie Hebdo’s editorial selections, the discharge of personally identifiable details about tens of hundreds of its clients constitutes a grave menace,” Microsoft mentioned.
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