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Asharq Al-Awsat
Asharq Al-Awsat
World
Asharq Al-Awsat

IRGC-Affiliated News Agency Hit by Cyberattack

A news agency affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was hacked late Friday in line with protests over Mahsa Amini’s death, local media reported.

The IRGC’s Tasnim news agency said on Friday evening that hackers have disrupted the work of Iran’s Fars news agency for few minutes.

According to AFP, the government-affiliated agency is one of the main sources of news disseminated by the state during the protests, which the agency describes as “riots.”

Fars said that its website had been disrupted late Friday by a “complex hacking and cyberattack operation.”

“Cyberattacks against Fars news agency are carried out almost daily from different countries, including the occupied territories (Israel),” it added in a statement posted Saturday on its Telegram channel, without elaborating.

On October 21, a group called Black Reward said it had obtained documents related to Iran's nuclear program and demanded the release of all political prisoners and people arrested during the protests.

After its 24-hour ultimatum expired, material on social media said to be released by the group included a short clip from a purported nuclear site in Iran, as well as documents.

On November 23, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran acknowledged that one of its subsidiaries had been targeted by “a specific foreign country,” while downplaying the importance of the documents in question.

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