Iranian Hacker Group Claims Ties to the Government: Who?
I love this story. I think it’s really interesting and very compelling. So, I went ahead and did some primary source research on Ashiyane by looking at their forums.
They claim their forum to be “Iran’s first security forum.” However looking at it a bit closer you see that it’s really more a step-by-step collection of how to be a script-kiddie. It has everything from where to download and how to use Trojan horse backdoors (like back orifice and such), password sniffers, port scanning tools (nmap), conducting DDoS and DoS attacks, password cracking software (john the ripper), and much more. Most places at least vaguely try to hide that they’re giving this information out for illegal purposes, instead saying things like “conduct your own DDoS attack on your own network only!” or something like that, but they don’t even try. They must say the word hack (abbreviated to hk and which they are definitely taking to mean illegal hacking not just doing creative things with computers as some hackers use the term) a million times in the forum.
The forum includes about 45,000 members, but their group is definitely fairly limited, the media claims 15 people and it’s probably somewhere close to that if not exactly that. Here’s some of their work:
You’ll notice the Hamas picture on the right, showing their anti-Israeli stance.
Something else that makes me think they have actual ties to the government is their hacking style. It’s very political. However, from what I’ve seen of their forum (and I definitely haven’t seen a lot of it, there’s some “private” areas for members only) they aren’t that politically charged. That makes me think someone is pushing them to do some politically-charged hacking.
Here’s their facebook page, it’s in Persian so use google translate to read their description, you’ll note no political messages:
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=ashiyane&init=quick#/group.php?gid=39484951932&v=info&ref=search
Oh in case you’re curious this is a picture of Behrooz Kamalian I found on Facebook.
and here’s the link to their forum (also in Persian). A word of caution before checking out the forum, if you thought “1337speak” (1337sp34k) was painful in English, wait until it’s combined with a poor translation from Persian, poor grammar to begin with (most likely), and the word hack being abbreviated hk about 10 million times in rapid fire: