Iran Focus

London, 28 August – After being alerted by the vigilant researchers at the cybersecurity firm FireEye, Facebook, Google, and Twitter have deleted hundreds of accounts.

The FireEye team followed what looked to the untrained eye like unrelated threads for the last few month. They examined the phone numbers used by these accounts to sign up for Twitter, the emails they used to register domains, and the changes to their account names over time. The Iranian operation began to unravel.

Iran Focus

London, 28 August – Pro-Iranian governments and Hezbollah media outlets are gloating over the news that Donald Trump’s days in office may soon be ending, which reflects entirely how much of a threat he posed to their continued existence and how his policy on Iran constantly thwarted the mullahs.

Trump is going through a significant political crisis, but he has not yet been impeached or otherwise forced out of office. Therefore, any errant speculation by the media of a country or by officials themselves will not help these countries if Trump remains in power until the end of his first term.

Iran Focus

London, 27 August – Anyone using social media to incite people to “insult sanctities” or “damage public property” will be punished, warned Iranian Police Commander Hossein Ashtari when he spoke at a ceremony in Yazdel, in Isfahan Province. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Brigadier General said, “People behind social media call-ups should leave the illusion aside that people will follow them.”

“anyone who insults Islamic sanctities or any of the Great Prophets or [12] Shi’ite imams or the Holy Fatima shall be executed if the insult is considered saab ul-nabi (insulting Prophet Muhammad); otherwise, they shall be sentenced to one to five years’ imprisonment,” stipulates Article 513 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code. Iran’s security and intelligence forces have always aggressively confronted what they call “insulting sanctities” and “blasphemy” in speeches, essays, books, and media.

Iran Focus

London, 27 August – Tech giant Google announced on Thursday that it had uncovered a “state-sponsored phishing attack” connected to the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), which is the first time that the company found a direct link between the state-run media outlet and misinformation attacks from Iran.

A blog post from Google stated that a number of YouTube channels, blogs and Google+ accounts linked to the IRIB that had disguised their relationship whilst sharing English-language political content in the US had been “identified and terminated”.