Who Is The Iranian Cyber Army And Why Are They Attacking Big Sites?

by Lee on January 30, 2010

in Hacking

Since around the time that people have been able to access the Internet there have been many political movements that have sprung from it.

No matter what the cause was, or where it originated from, people have been able to use the Internet to speak about their point of view.

No matter right or wrong, in most countries, they were able to say what was on their minds.

Let The Hacking Do The Talking

Some of these people do it by the use of hacking.

Again, this has also been the case, as long as the Internet has been available.

Some people use hacking as sort of a light form of protest.

They might try not to do permanent damage, but instead, try to make the site owners life a little unbearable.

Others will use their hacking skills and try to permanently damage anyone that they disagree with.

This is sort of a scorched earth policy of take no prisoners.

the Iranian Cyber Army

The Iranian Cyber Army

The group, “The Iranian Cyber Army”, falls into this category.

In the past couple of months, there have been some major sites that have been attacked by this organization.

Some of these major sites include Baidu, the Chinese version of Google, and Twitter.

The Twitter hack was the one that got this group put on the map.

They did it, not through something as simple as a DDOS attack, but through a combination of being both tech savvy and through using social engineering.

They were able to collect an employee of Twitter’s credentials.

They then used it to change the DNS information to Twitter’s web site, so that it redirected somewhere else.

This turned out to be a pretty big news story.

Now comes the news that they have done the same thing to Baidu as well.

Again, this is like taking Google’s homepage and redirecting it somewhere else.

If it is not technically impressive, you will still have to marvel on how they get such delicate information to big companies such as these.

To take a large company such as Baidu and take over the domain is impressive.

But there is a concern when it comes to the Iranian Cyber Army.

Government Backing?

People would like to know, if they are financially backed by the government of Iran.

If they are, then this leads to whole other set of problems when it comes to this group.

Even if  a lot of people do not agree with their cause, this is still a modern day version of hacktivism.

We haven’t seen anything like this, on this grand of a scale, for a long time.

Of course there have been plenty of security breaches at major web sites, but these were all financially related.

This sort of attack has, so far, been a political protest.

But if the government is backing them, this is less a protest and more like a case of cyber espionage.

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