David DiMolfetta,
As tensions between Iran and Israel hit a boiling point in the past week, officials warned Americans to brace for cyberattacks from Tehran-aligned hackers. U.S. agencies and other experts focused their warnings on cyber-physical threats, basing their views off of years of past Iranian cyber incursions around the world that have sought to sabotage and degrade critical infrastructure platforms.
But one Iran-linked unit, according to research out Tuesday, has been taking a different approach that’s gone largely under the radar. The CyberAv3ngers, which made waves in late 2023 for defacing numerous water system displays in the U.S., has increasingly shifted its operations from technical intrusions to psychological manipulation, according to threat intelligence firm DomainTools.
The dynamic reflects a growing emphasis within Iran’s national cyber strategy to shape online narratives as much as it tries to disrupt infrastructure. One of the CyberAv3ngers group’s most publicized campaigns — a purported intrusion into Israel’s Dorad power station in October 2023 — never happened, DomainTools determined. The scheme fooled some media outlets and lit up threat monitoring forums, according to the firm, which provides cybersecurity threat intelligence by analyzing website domains and internet metadata.
But the deception was the goal. By staging breaches and creating spectacle, the group transformed into an operator hellbent on backing the Iranian regime as both a digital saboteur and propagandist.
Many cyber-enabled influence campaigns are coordinated across known Iranian threat groups, though the DomainTools analysis of recent CyberAv3ngers activity suggests a tighter integration between psychological operations and technical targeting.
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