International Courant
Sweden’s Sapo safety service accuses Iran’s intelligence service of hacking an SMS service to ship 15,000 messages to Sweden.
Based on Sapo, the info breach final summer time concerned textual content messages calling for “revenge on Koran burners” after a number of anti-Islam activists set fireplace to copies of the Islamic holy ebook.
Preliminary investigations led by prosecutors have revealed {that a} cyber group referred to as Anzu, performing on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), sought to sow division in society and painting Sweden as an Islamophobic nation.
Though the Swedish authorities condemned the Koran burnings and the police tried to ban them, they had been allowed by the courts below freedom of expression legal guidelines.
The incidents sparked outrage in a number of Muslim-majority nations, with the Swedish embassy in Iraq additionally being set on fireplace by protesters.
Final month, Swedish prosecutors charged an Iraqi activist and an confederate with incitement towards an ethnic group in reference to the ebook burnings. Each males deny wrongdoing.
The Anzu group is alleged to have hacked a Swedish firm’s textual content messaging service in late July 2023, taking on passwords, usernames and different sources. On August 1, they despatched a message to personal people saying, “Those that insulted the Quran ought to be punished for his or her work.”
Sapo’s Fredrik Hallstrom instructed the Dagens Nyheter web site that quite a few individuals concerned within the operation had ties to the Revolutionary Guard and that the textual content messages partly succeeded in additional inflaming the risk towards Sweden.
Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist mentioned investigators had managed to find out the identities of the Iranian hackers, however that there was no risk of extraditing them and that their preliminary investigation had been suspended.
The safety service warned that international powers reminiscent of Iran had been seizing alternatives to sow division and strengthen their very own regimes.
Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer mentioned in a press release that it is vitally critical {that a} state actor like Iran is searching for to “destabilize Sweden or improve polarization in our nation.”
It’s not the primary time that the Swedish Safety Service has accused the Iranian authorities of finishing up hostile acts on its territory.
In Might final 12 months, Sapo mentioned that Tehran was utilizing legal networks in Sweden to hold out violent actions towards different states, teams or people in Sweden that Iran noticed as a risk.
It recognized Iran, together with Russia and China, as potential candidates. the most important safety threats to Sweden.
