According to the reports, people working on Iran policy were targeted in the cyber attacks, including personnel in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Journalists and academics also suffered.
A surge in hacking attacks was noticed after the landmark international agreement this past summer that was supposed to ease severe economic sanctions on Iran if Tehran curbs its nuclear program in return, to ensure it is not developing weapons.
The hacking group in question is a powerful branch of the Iranian military that has regularly attacked American government agencies in recent years. However, the hacking reportedly increased after the arrest of Siamak Namazi in October, who is a head of strategic planning for Crescent Petroleum, an oil and gas company in the UAE, known to be working for think tanks in Washington. Siamak Namazi had been detained and interrogated regularly by the Revolutionary Guards before his arrest.
Apparently, the American officials believe that some of the more recent attacks might be linked to reports of detained dual citizens and others. In the meantime, Namazi’s friends and business associates claimed that Revolutionary Guards confiscated his computer after ransacking his family’s home in Tehran. When reached for comments, a spokesman at Iran’s UN mission in New York said that Tehran had been falsely accused of cyber attacks.
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