nytimes.com By Farnaz FassihiRonen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti 2025/08/30
Israel was able to track the movements of key Iranian figures and assassinate them during the 12-day war this spring by following the cellphones carried by members of their security forces.
The meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.
It was June 16, the fourth day of Iran’s war with Israel, and Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gathered for an emergency meeting in a bunker 100 feet below a mountain slope in the western part of Tehran. For days, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign had destroyed military, government and nuclear sites around Iran, and had decimated the top echelon of Iran’s military commanders and nuclear scientists.
The officials, who included President Masoud Pezeshkian, the heads of the judiciary and the intelligence ministry and senior military commanders, arrived in separate cars. None of them carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them.
Despite all the precautions, Israeli jets dropped six bombs on top of the bunker soon after the meeting began, targeting the two entrance and exit doors. Remarkably, nobody in the bunker was killed. When the leaders later made their way out of the bunker, they found the bodies of a few guards, killed by the blasts.
The attack threw Iran’s intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside.
Israel’s tracking of the guards has not been previously reported. It was one part of a larger effort to penetrate the most tightly guarded circles of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus that has had officials in Tehran chasing shadows for two months.
According to Iranian and Israeli officials, Iranian security guards’ careless use of mobile phones over several years — including posting on social media — played a central role in allowing Israeli military intelligence to hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders and the Israeli Air Force to swoop in and kill them with missiles and bombs during the first week of the June war.
“We know senior officials and commanders did not carry phones, but their interlocutors, security guards and drivers had phones; they did not take precautions seriously, and this is how most of them were traced,” said Sasan Karimi, who previously served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s current government and is now a political analyst and lecturer at Tehran University.
The account of Israel’s strike on the meeting, and the details of how it tracked and targeted Iranian officials and commanders, is based on interviews with five senior Iranian officials, two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and nine Israeli military and intelligence officials.
The security breakdowns with the bodyguards are just one component of what Iranian officials acknowledge has been a long-running and often successful effort by Israel to use spies and operatives placed around the country as well as technology against Iran, sometimes with devastating effect.
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Following the most recent conflict, Iran remains focused on hunting down operatives that it fears remain present in the country and the government.
“Infiltration has reached the highest echelons of our decision making,” Mostafa Hashemi Taba, a former vice president and minister, said in an interview with Iranian media in late June.
This month Iran executed a nuclear scientist, Roozbeh Vadi, on allegations of spying for Israel and facilitating the assassination of another scientist. Three senior Iranian officials and a member of the Revolutionary Guards said Iran had quietly arrested or placed under house arrest dozens of people from the military, intelligence and government branches who were suspected of spying for Israel, some of them high-ranking. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied a connection to those so accused.
Spy games between Iran and Israel have been a constant feature of a decades-long shadow war between the two countries, and Israel’s success in June in killing so many important Iranian security figures shows just how much Israel has gained the upper hand.
President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran attending a protest in Tehran on June 22, following the U.S. attacks on nuclear sites in Iran. Mr. Pezeshkian himself escaped an attack on a bunker on June 16.
Credit...
Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Israel had been tracking senior Iranian nuclear scientists since the end of 2022 and had weighed killing them as early as last October but held off to avoid a clash with the Biden administration, Israeli officials said.
From the end of last year until June, what the Israelis called a “decapitation team” reviewed the files of all the scientists in the Iranian nuclear project known to Israel, to decide which they would recommend to kill. The first list contained 400 names. That was reduced to 100, mainly based on material from an Iranian nuclear archive that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had stolen from Iran in 2018. In the end, Iran said the Israelis focused on and killed 13 scientists.
At the same time, Israel was building its capacity to target and kill senior Iranian military officials under a program called “Operation Red Wedding,” a play on a bloody “Game of Thrones” episode. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force, was the first target, one Israeli official said.
Ultimately, Israeli officials said, the basic idea in both operations was to locate 20 to 25 human targets in Iran and hit all of them in the opening strike of the campaign, on the assumption that they would be more careful afterward, making them much harder to hit.
In a video interview with an Iranian journalist, the newly appointed head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said that although Israel had human operatives and spies in the country, it had tracked senior officials and scientists and discovered the location of sensitive meetings mostly through advanced technology.
“The enemy gets the majority of its intelligence through technology, satellites and electronic data,” General Vahidi said. “They can find people, get information, their voices, images and zoom in with precise satellites and find the locations.”
From the Israeli side, Iran’s growing awareness of the threat to senior figures came to be seen as an opportunity. Fearing more assassinations on the ground of the sort that Israel had pulled off successfully in the past, the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered extensive security measures including large contingents of bodyguards and warned against the use of mobile phones and messaging apps like WhatsApp, which is commonly used in Iran.
Those bodyguards, Israel discovered, were not only carrying cellphones but even posting from them on social media.
“Using so many bodyguards is a weakness that we imposed on them, and we were able to take advantage of that,” one Israeli defense official said.
Iranian officials had long suspected that Israel was tracking the movements of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists through their mobile phones. Last year, after Israel detonated bombs hidden inside thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, Iran banned many of its officials in particularly sensitive jobs from using smartphones, social media and messaging apps.
Smartphones are now completely off limits for senior military commanders, nuclear scientists and government officials.
The protection of senior officials, military commanders and nuclear scientists is the responsibility of an elite brigade within the Revolutionary Guards called Ansar al-Mehdi. The commander in chief of Ansar, appointed last August after the new government came into office, is Gen. Mohamad Javad Assadi, one of the youngest senior commanders in the Guards.
General Assadi had personally warned several senior commanders and a top nuclear scientist, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, that Israel was planning to assassinate them at least a month before they were killed on the first day of the war, according to two senior Iranian officials with knowledge of the conversation. He had also called a meeting with the team leaders of security details asking them to take extra precautions, the officials said.
The cellphone ban initially did not extend to the security guards protecting the officials, scientists and commanders. That changed after Israel’s wave of assassinations on the first day of the war. Guards are now supposed to carry only walkie-talkies. Only team leaders who do not travel with the officials can carry cellphones.
But despite the new rules, according to officials who have held meetings with General Assadi about security, someone violated them and carried a phone to the National Security Council meeting, allowing the Israelis to carry out the pinpoint strike.
Hamzeh Safavi, a political and military analyst whose father is the top military adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, said that Israel’s technological superiority over Iran was an existential threat. He said Iran had no choice but to conduct a security shakedown, overhaul its protocols and make difficult decisions — including arrests and prosecution of high-level spies.
“We must do whatever it takes to identify and address this threat; we have a major security and intelligence bug and nothing is more urgent than repairing this hole,” Mr. Safavi said in a telephone interview.
Iran’s minister of intelligence said in a statement this month that it had foiled an Israeli assassination attempt on 23 senior officials but did not provide their names or details of their positions and ranks. It said in the months leading up to the war, Iran had discovered and foiled 13 plots by Israel that aimed to kill 35 senior military and government officials. (An Israeli intelligence official disputed the Iranian account, saying that Israel had not been carrying out operations ahead of the surprise attack in June that could have led to heightened alertness on the part of Iran.)
The statement also said that security forces had identified and arrested 21 people on charges of spying for the Mossad and working as field and support operators in at least 11 provinces around Iran.
Iran has also accelerated efforts to recruit its own spies in Israel since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in the Gaza Strip and triggered aggressive Israeli military operations in Iran and Lebanon.
Over the past year, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has arrested dozens of Israelis and charged them with being paid agents of Iran, accused of helping collect intelligence about potential targets for Iranian strikes on Israel.
Israel has made killing Iran’s top nuclear scientists an urgent priority as a way to set back the nation’s nuclear program, even poisoning two young upcoming scientists.
As Iran made steady progress over the years toward enriching its uranium stockpile into near-weapons grade material, Israeli military and intelligence officials concluded that the campaign of sabotage and explosions in the enrichment apparatus, which the Mossad had been engaged in for many years, had only a marginal impact.
In 2021, according to three Israeli security officials, the focus turned to what Israeli officials called “the weapon group” — a cadre of Iranian scientists who the Israelis believed met regularly to work on building a device to trigger the enriched uranium and cause a nuclear explosion. This is one of the most technologically difficult parts of a nuclear project. (Iran has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and the U.N.’s atomic watchdog and American intelligence agencies have long assessed that Iran has not weaponized its nuclear project.)
It was this group of scientists that became the focus of what Israel called Operation Narnia, the military plan to kill off scientists during the war’s early days this spring.
By the time of the June 16 national security meeting of top Iranian officials, Israel had already killed a number of high-profile figures associated with the nuclear program, including Mr. Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi, another nuclear scientist, both killed just days earlier. The cellphones of their bodyguards helped Israel target all of them.
But Israel was also targeting a wide variety of Iranian leaders, including the heads of government branches at the national security meeting, and killed at least 30 senior military commanders through strikes during the war.
General Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ air force, assembled his leadership team, accompanied by their security units, at the very start of the war to monitor intelligence about possible Israeli strikes. Israeli warplanes swooped in and carried out a pinpoint strike on the bunker where General Hajizadeh had taken refuge, killing him and other top commanders.
Mr. Hajizadeh’s son Alireza has said that his father took extra caution with phones. On a video published on Iranian media, he said that “when my father wanted to discuss something important he would tell us to take the phones and smart devices out of the room and place it far away.”
The ability to track the bodyguards also helped lead the Israelis to the June 16 meeting. The attendees, in addition to Mr. Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, included the speaker of Parliament, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, and the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Also on hand were the ministers of the interior, defense and intelligence and military commanders, some brand-new to their jobs after their bosses had been killed in previous strikes.
The attack destroyed the room, which soon filled with debris, smoke and dust, and the power was cut, according to accounts that emerged afterward. Mr. Pezeshkian found a narrow opening through the debris, where a sliver of light and oxygen was coming through, he has said publicly.
Three senior officials said the president dug through the debris with his bare hands, eventually making enough of a space for everyone to crawl out one by one. Mr. Pezeshkian had a minor leg injury from a shrapnel wound and the minister of interior was taken to the hospital for respiratory distress, officials said.
“There was only one hole, and we saw there was air coming and we said, we won’t suffocate. Life hinges on one second,” Mr. Pezeshkian said recently, recounting the attack in a meeting with senior clerics, according to a video published in Iranian media. He said if Israel had succeeded in killing the country’s top officials it would have created chaos in the country.
“People,” he said, “would have lost hope.”
In the summer of 2005, Tan Dailin was a 20-year-old grad student at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering when he came to the attention of the People’s Liberation Army of China.
Tan was part of a burgeoning hacker community known as the Honkers—teens and twentysomethings in late-’90s and early-’00s China who formed groups like the Green Army and Evil Octal and launched patriotic cyberattacks against Western targets they deemed disrespectful to China. The attacks were low-sophistication—mostly website defacements and denial-of-service operations targeting entities in the US, Taiwan, and Japan—but the Honkers advanced their skills over time, and Tan documented his escapades in blog posts. After publishing about hacking targets in Japan, the PLA came calling.
The subsequent timeline of events is unclear, but Tan, who went by the hacker handles Wicked Rose and Withered Rose, then launched his own hacking group—the Network Crack Program Hacker (NCPH). The group quickly gained notoriety for winning hacking contests and developing hacking tools. They created the GinWui rootkit, one of China’s first homegrown remote-access backdoors and then, experts believe, used it and dozens of zero-day exploits they wrote in a series of “unprecedented” hacks against US companies and government entities over the spring and summer of 2006. They did this on behalf of the PLA, according to Adam Kozy, who tracked Tan and other Chinese hackers for years as a former FBI analyst who now heads the SinaCyber consulting firm, focused on China.
Tan revealed online at the time that he and his team were being paid about $250 a month for their hacking, though he didn’t say who paid or what they hacked. The pay increased to $1,000 a month after their summer hacking spree, according to a 2007 report by former threat intelligence firm VeriSign iDefense.
At some point, Tan switched teams and began contracting for the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s civilian intelligence agency, as part of its notorious hacking group known as APT 41. And in 2020, when Tan was 36, the US Justice Department announced indictments against him and other alleged APT 41 members for hacking more than 100 targets, including US government systems, health care organizations, and telecoms.
Tan’s path to APT 41 isn’t unique. He’s just one of many former Honkers who began their careers as self-directed patriotic hackers before being absorbed by the state into its massive spying apparatus.
Not a lot has been written about the Honkers and their critical role in China’s APT operations, outside of congressional testimony Kozy gave in 2022. But a new report, published this month by Eugenio Benincasa, senior cyberdefense researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zürich university in Switzerland, expands on Kozy’s work to track the Honkers’ early days and how this group of skilled youths became some of China’s most prolific cyberspies.
“This is not just about [Honkers] creating a hacker culture that was implicitly aligned with national security goals,” Benincasa says, “but also the personal relations they created [that] we still see reflected in the APTs today.”
Early Days
The Honker community largely began when China joined the internet in 1994, and a network connecting universities and research centers across the country for knowledge-sharing put Chinese students online before the rest of the country. Like US hackers, the Honkers were self-taught tech enthusiasts who flocked to electronic bulletin boards (dial-up forums) to share programming and computer hacking tips. They soon formed groups like Xfocus, China Eagle Union, and The Honker Union of China and came to be known as Red Hackers or Honkers, a name derived from the Mandarin word “hong,” for red, and “heike,” for dark visitor—the Chinese term for hacker.
The open source software easyjson is used by the US government and American companies. But its ties to Russia’s VK, whose CEO has been sanctioned, have researchers sounding the alarm.
Security researchers warn that a popular open source tool maintained by Russian developers could pose significant risks to US national security.
Key Points:
The open source tool easyjson is linked to VK Group, a company run by a sanctioned Russian executive.
easyjson is widely used in the US across various critical sectors including defense, finance, and healthcare.
Concerns are heightened due to the potential for data theft and cyberattacks stemming from this software.
*Recent findings from cybersecurity researchers at Hunted Labs indicate that easyjson, a code serialization tool for the Go programming language, is at the center of a national security alert. This tool, which has been integrated into multiple sectors such as the US Department of Defense, is maintained by a group of Russian developers linked to VK Group, led by Vladimir Kiriyenko. While the complete codebase appears secure, the geopolitical context surrounding its management raises substantial concerns about the potential risks involved.
The significance of easyjson cannot be overstated, as it serves as a foundational element within the cloud-native ecosystem, critical for operations across various platforms. With connections to a sanctioned CEO and the broader backdrop of Russian state-backed cyberattacks, the fear is that easyjson could be manipulated to conduct espionage or potentially compromise critical infrastructures. Such capabilities underscore the pressing need for independent evaluations and potential reevaluations of software supply chains, particularly when foreign entities are involved.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., today, unsealed two separate indictments that allege Chinese nationals Yin Kecheng, 38, (尹 可成) a/k/a “YKC” (“YIN”) and Zhou Shuai, 45, (周帅) a/k/a “Coldface” (“ZHOU”) violated various federal statutes by participating in years-long, sophisticated computer hacking conspiracies that successfully targeted a wide variety of U.S.-based victims
This blog post covers the full details of EntrySign, the AMD Zen microcode signature validation vulnerability recently discovered by the Google Security team.
Four alleged European hackers have been arrested in Phuket for deploying ransomware on the networks of 17 Swiss firms. The suspects are accused of causing significant damage and stealing $16 million in Bitcoins from 1,000 global victims.
Security researchers have discovered an arbitrary account takeover flaw in Subaru's Starlink service that could let attackers track, control, and hijack vehicles in the United States, Canada, and Japan using just a license plate.
#Account #Canada #Car #Computer #Hacking #InfoSec #Japan #Security #Starlink #Subaru #Takeover #USA
Cyber criminals claim to have successfully attacked Medion, a distributor of electronic products.
In a first, Russia's APT28 hacking group appears to have remotely breached the Wi-Fi of an espionage target by hijacking a laptop in another building across the street.
Etudiant en informatique, fasciné par l’univers des cybercriminels, il est accusé d’avoir lancé des attaques par bourrage d’identifiants à l’automne 2023. Récit d'audience.
Sophos went so far as to plant surveillance “implants” on its own devices to catch the hackers at work—and in doing so, revealed a glimpse into China's R&D pipeline of intrusion techniques.
Reuters News has restored to its website an investigation into mercenary hacking after a New Delhi court lifted a takedown order it issued last year.
The article, originally published on Nov. 16, 2023, and titled “How an Indian startup hacked the world,” detailed the origins and operations of a New Delhi-based cybersecurity firm called Appin. Reuters found that Appin grew from an educational startup to a hack-for-hire powerhouse that stole secrets from executives, politicians and wealthy elites around the globe.
The hacking group's X account shared videos comparing Xi Jinping to an emperor and others commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations.
APT42, which is believed to work for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted about a dozen people associated with both Trump’s and Biden’s campaigns this spring, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group.
The Sykhiv residential area in Lviv was left without hot water and heating as a result of a hacker attack on Lvivteploenergo. This is reported on the company's website.
"The hacker attack disrupted the heat supply management system. Work is underway to restore heating and hot water supply in the Sykhiv residential area. The estimated time of restoration is 21:00," the statement said.
Researchers have discovered several vulnerabilities in popular WordPress plugins that allow attackers to create rogue admin accounts.
#attacks #breach #computer #cyber #data #hack #hacker #hacking #how #information #malware #network #news #ransomware #security #software #the #to #today #updates #vulnerability
Sources suspect China is behind the targeted exploitation of two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco’s security appliances.
Researchers uncover a fresh wave of the Raspberry Robin campaign spreading malware through malicious Windows Script Files (WSFs) since March 2024.
#attacks #breach #computer #cyber #data #hack #hacker #hacking #how #information #malware #network #news #ransomware #security #software #the #to #today #updates #vulnerability
