U.S. Officials: Iranian Cyber-Attacks, Arrest of Americans May Be Linked

U.S. officials believe that the increasing number of hacking attacks carried out this past month by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) against American government personnel may be linked to the arrests of American-Iranian citizens by the regime, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

At the time of his arrest, the IRGC seized Namazi’s computer.

According to the Journal, friends and associates of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian were similarly targeted following his arrest last year.

Associates of Namazi say that the IRGC, which is believed to be responsible for his arrest and which reports directly to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is using the cyber-attacks to help “build a false espionage case” against him.

In Iran Has Built an Army of Cyber-Proxies, published in the August 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Jordan Brunner examined how Iran became one of the world’s leading forces in cyber-warfare:

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Iran is adept at building terrorist and other illicit networks around the world. Its cyber-capabilities are no different. It uses the inexpensive method of training and collaborating with proxies in the art of cyber-war. It may also have collaborated with North Korea, which infamously attacked Sony in response to the film The Interview. It is possible that Iran assisted North Korea in developing the cyber-capability necessary to carry out the Sony hack. While acknowledging that there is no definite proof of this, Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies raised the question in The Tower earlier this year.

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Read the full article here.