After the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo launched a cartoon contest mocking Iran's ruling cleric, a state-backed Iranian cyber unit retaliated with a hack-and-leak campaign designed to instill fear with the alleged theft of a large subscriber database, according to Microsoft security researchers.
The FBI has blamed the same Iranian cyber operators, Emennet Pasargad, for an influence operation aimed at interfering in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, according to an blog post published Friday by the tech giant. In recent years, Iran has increased the use of false-flag cyber operations to discredit adversaries.
According to Microsoft, a group calling itself "Holy Souls" and posing as hacktivists claimed in early January to have acquired personal details on 200,000 subscribers and Charlie Hebdo merchandise buyers.
As evidence of the data theft, "Holy Souls" published a 200-record sample of Charlie Hebdo subscribers' names, phone numbers, home and email addresses, which "could put the magazine's subscribers at danger for online or physical targeting" by extremists. The group then marketed the alleged complete data cache for $340,000 on several dark web sites. Microsoft stated that it had no knowledge of anyone purchasing the cache.
A Charlie Hebdo representative stated on Friday that the newspaper would not comment on the Microsoft study. Iran's UN mission did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. The release of the sample on January 4 coincided with the publication of Charlie Hebdo's cartoon contest issue. Participants were asked to create offensive caricatures of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The operation coincided with Tehran's verbal attacks condemning Charlie Hebdo's "insult." The controversially irreverent magazine has a long history of publishing vulgar cartoons that critics regard as deeply insulting to Muslims. In 2015, two French-born al-Qaida extremists attacked the newspaper's office, killing 12 cartoonists, and Charlie Hebdo has been the target of other attacks in the past.
The magazine promoted the Khamenei caricature contest as a gesture of solidarity for the nationwide antigovernment protests that have erupted in Iran since the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman detained by Iran's morality police for allegedly violating the country's strict Islamic dress code, in mid-September.
Following the publishing of the cartoon issue, Iran closed down a decades-old French research institute. It announced sanctions last week against more than 30 European individuals and entities, including three senior Charlie Hebdo employees. The sanctions are mostly symbolic, as they prohibit travel to Iran and allow Iranian authorities to freeze bank accounts and seize property there.