Why does the “Iranian Cyber Army” use the red star, a communist symbol from the soviet era?
It’s Twitter Friday again! Welcome back to my weekly column. Apparently Twitter or rather its DNS got hacked. DNS is that little thingy that assigns real Internet addresses (like Twitter.com) to those so called IP addresses or rather numbers websites hide behind. This is what we know. The rest of the story is quite questionable though.
To be honest I don’t believe the “Iranian Cyber Army” is real, like there is an organization of hackers behind it.
Also the footprints they’ve left neither look like real hackers nor like real Iranians. I’ll explain why.
The “Iranian Cyber Army” does not sound like Iranians. Why?
- Iranians speak and write Farsi while the hacked sites did not contain any Farsi messages. There was some broken English and an image with Arabic on it. It looked Arabic to me so I asked an native Farsi speaker and he confirmed that it’s Arabic not Farsi.
- Iranians, at least those from Iran supportive of the current Islamic government don’t use soviet era communist symbols. The “Iranian Cyber army” mimics the red army star though. In fact the Islamic rulers of Iran prosecute communists. Most of them had to flee the country after the Islamic revolution had succeeded.
- Hacking Twitter is really bad for Iran. Almost everybody in the West dislikes Iran anyway and wrongly assumes that it’s the biggest threat since the cold war. So they really, really need some sympathy and this is the worst press they can get now.
- Some people argue that this might be some kind of retaliation for Twitter role in the support of the protests after the election. Remember, the US State Department ordered Twitter to postpone a downtime so that news about the anti-government protests can get spread. Back then it would have made some sense to hack Twitter, but now?
- It might be a false flag operation to further get support for measures against Iran. Both people in the US and Israel use cyber warfare against Iran.
The “Iranian Cyber Army” does not sound like hackers. Why?
- Hackers usually don’t put GMail addresses on compromised pages.
- Even in case Iranian hackers would want to use an email address on a hacked page, especially such a big one like Twitter they would probably not choose US based GMail for this task as those emails can easily get intercepted by the US government. Also the sheer number of emails they’ll get renders this step useless.
- The English on the hacked Twitter page was awful. Don’t hackers know proper translation tools and spell checkers?
- Usually hackers, especially those of the political kind don’t target the DNS. They look for code vulnerabilities or they use DoS (Denial of service) attacks by sending too many requests to websites. The US based hackers who hacked Iranian sites after the election did just that.
I’m not a computer security expert but I’ve seen plenty of hacks and compromised websites and there are patterns. This attack is quite unusual. Also it does appear to be highly illogical.
- Why use soviet era red army stars instead of Islamic or Iranian symbols?
- Why write in broken English and publish an image with Arabic text?
This seems to be a case where everybody is made to blame Iran but it’s highly unlikely that Iranians did this. Also the theory about renegade hackers seems inappropriate. The “Iranian Cyber Army” hasn’t appeared in the past before the recent attacks (another site has been hit as well). Google can’t find any results published before these two hacks.
The question is: Who gains support by this attack? Certainly not Iran. It’s really embarrassing for them. Also Iranians don’t like Arabs so why use Arabic? They fought a war a few years ago. Remember the Iraq – Iran war where the West and most Arabic monarchies supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion?
I know that reality sometimes is stranger than fiction but this case is obviously too weird to be what it seems to be. What do you think?
Although technically I am not knowledgeable enough to argue whether this is something that Iranian regime’s IT nerds or their Russian allies are capable of or not, knowing the regime and its broad range of terror inflicts on its own people I can easily see why they might have done this: 1st the argument that they don’t like Arabs or Arabic is not compelling at all, because after this regime came to power it has used everything in their power to replace Persian words with the Arabic counterparts. 2nd, don’t forget that this is a regime supporting terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas — they even have a state run Arabic TV channel for their Arab friends. 3rd, there is a couple of poetry verses in Persian at the bottom of the flag! But more than anything else, this is what exactly they would do to intimidate the dissident voice through twitter which has been by far the most powerful means of communication for the Iranian green movement especially after the rigged election in June.
If you think about what has just happened recently: after December 7th which was the anniversary of Iranian students uprising against oppression and dictatorship, they realized that none of the crackdowns, torture, rape and killings can intimidate people and they are able to organize massive protests, they put up another deceitful show by tearing Khomeini’s image and projecting that this was done by the demonstrators. Why? to justify prosecution and execution of their opponents who supposedly have done this! And all of this in the eve of Moharram, which is the month that symbolizes for shiite muslims resistance and uprising against oppressors and memorial of martyrs. Students led protests in Iran will not stop during this month, instead they will be out again protesting the imprisonments, tortures and killings. Now, don’t you think it makes sense for the regime to try to stop the non-stoppable by this kind of fearmongering — especially since twitter has been instrumental in the Iranian dissidents’ Green Movement?!
Hi Tad, My name is Mahdad, I am an opposition party member of Iran. For sure these people who has hacked the Twitter were Iranian, You don’t know how much they spend to have very good group of computer and IT geniuses. They have a group of engineers about more that 2400 people only for a section in Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. They spend so much money for destroying everything. If you have an account on Facebook I would like to be you friend.
Best Regards,
Mahdad E.
Please… I suppose this is a US government consipiracy or some other hairbrained conspiracy theory? You think they don’t have anyone who can read and write perfect Farsi and they have been forced to use Arabic? Also, online translation tools usually produce pretty poor English btw. Do you actually have experience with any other languages? It might be easy to convert two Latin based languages but I doubt Farsi and English have many similarities. That’s why we still have human translators.
Also Iran has a long long history or shooting itself in the foot as far as public relations with the outside world are concerned. It is pretty much standard operating procedure. I believe it is interal PR which it cares about and this could give their supporters a sense of empowerment. You do realize Iran is conducting a longstanding war against Internet opposition right now? People are being forced to log into their Facebook and Twitter accounts when they arrive at the airport in Iran in many cases and families of Facebook and Twitter posters have been threatened. What has just happened is hardly surprising. Do your research.
I have been dealing with this group for several months. They are connected to anonimous and whyweprotest.net. A guy named Austinheap in San Francisco is also involved. As well as a crazy twitter profile called tehranweekly.
There is more about them an a public investigation on my website:
http://iran115.org/blacklist
Imagine a world without tweets. Its just too much. Seriously!