After the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo launched a cartoon contest mocking Iran’s ruling cleric, a state-backed Iranian cyber unit retaliated with a hack-and-leak campaign designed to instill fear with the alleged theft of a large subscriber database, according to Microsoft security researchers.
The FBI has blamed the same Iranian cyber operators, Emennet Pasargad, for an influence operation aimed at interfering in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, according to an blog post published Friday by the tech giant. In recent years, Iran has increased the use of false-flag cyber operations to discredit adversaries. According to Microsoft, a group calling itself “Holy Souls” and posing as hacktivists claimed in early January to have acquired personal details on 200,000 subscribers and Charlie Hebdo merchandise buyers.
As evidence of the data theft, “Holy Souls” published a 200-record sample of Charlie Hebdo subscribers’ names, phone numbers, home and email addresses, which “could put the magazine’s subscribers at danger for online or physical targeting” by extremists. The group then marketed the alleged complete data cache for $340,000 on several dark web sites. Microsoft stated that it had no knowledge of anyone purchasing the cache.
A Charlie Hebdo representative stated on Friday that the newspaper would not comment on the Microsoft study. Ir
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