Iran’s atomic energy agency suffered a data breach that reportedly saw thousands of emails leaked – but both the agency and the group behind the attack seemingly have their own version of events.
Reports say that the attackers hacked an email server belonging to one of the agency’s affiliates, accessed 324 mailboxes, and stole more than 100,000 email messages amounting to about 50 gigabytes of data.
Now, according to a press release from the same agency (roughly translated from Farsi), the attacker is a foreign player, who has stolen and leaked data from his device. endpoints (Opens in a new tab) despair and “to attract the attention of the public.” Other than that, the breach is worthless.
Supporting the Mohasa Amini protests
On the other hand, the group behind the attack reached the world via Telegram from a local hacking group called Black Reward, which says it carried out the attack as an act of support for protesters in Iran.
For more than a month now, protests have erupted in Iran, following the death of Mahsa Amini – the young woman who died after being arrested for not adhering to the country’s strict dress code. The group allegedly threatened to leak data online, unless the country’s authorities released political prisoners, and other people arrested during the protests.
Unlike the agency, which claims the data bears no real value, and contains mostly “technical messages and daily routine and current exchanges,” the group says the data includes “administrative and operational schedules for various parts of the Bushehr power plant,” passports and visas of Iranian specialists. and the Russians working there, and “nuclear development contracts and agreements with domestic and foreign partners”, record have found.
To prove its point, the group began distributing sensitive data, but recommended that interested parties only access it via a virtual machine, as the agency’s emails are tainted with viruses and other malware.
Across: record (Opens in a new tab)