After the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo launched a cartoon contest to mock Iran’s ruling cleric, a state-backed Iranian cyber unit struck back with a hack-and-leak campaign that was designed to provoke fear with the claimed pilfering of a big subscriber database, Microsoft security researchers say.
After the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's launched a cartoon contest to mock Iran's ruling cleric, a state-backed Iranian cyber unit struck back with a hack-and-leak campaign that was designed to provoke fear with the claimed pilfering of a big subscriber database, Microsoft security researchers say.
US computing giant Microsoft said Friday that it had identified Iranian state actors as those behind the recent cyberattack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft's Digital Threat Analysis Center, said that the hackers, who called themselves "Holy Souls," were Iranian cybersecurity firm Emennet Pasargad.In early January Holy Souls announced they had obtained the personal information of more than 200,000 Charlie Hebdo customers, and published a sample of the data as proof.