Early on Saturday, cities across Iran, including its capital Tehran, were rocked by a series of U.S. and Israel-led airstrikes that killed the country’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and top leadership. According to reports, the military campaign coincided with cyberattacks targeting the country, one of which flooded a popular phone app with notifications, amid an ongoing outage across the Iranian internet.
The strikes came after several days of failed negotiations between Tehran and Washington. The negotiations were held after weeks of mass protests that saw thousands of people killed alongside the country’s longest internet shutdown to date.
As missiles struck Iranian cities, people on the ground reported being flooded with unsolicited app notifications — not from the ailing government, but from an apparent outsider.
Users of the BadeSaba prayer app received several notifications on their phone, calling for a “reckoning” and promised amnesty for anyone who rises up against government forces, per Wired.
One of the notifications said the Iranian regime would “pay for their cruel and merciless actions against the innocent people of Iran,” implying the app was compromised to display anti-government messaging.
It’s not clear who is behind the hack of the app, which lists more than 5 million downloads.
The Jerusalem Post reported on Saturday that cyberattacks were used as part of the U.S. and Israeli attacks in an effort to limit the Iranian response. Both the U.S. and Israel have been suspected of conducting cyberattacks on banks and crypto exchanges to pressure Iran’s leadership, which has ruled since taking power in a 1989 revolution.
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