GoKawiilAs missile sirens wailed over Israel earlier this month, thousands of Israelis received texts claiming to be from their military, encouraging them to download a fake shelter app, which could have stolen reams of personal data.
Others received a mass text saying: “Netanyahu is dead. Death is approaching you and soon the gates of hell will open before you. Before the fire of Iranian missiles destroys you, leave Palestine.”
The messages, cyber security experts say, are the most visible end of a vast war being waged in the far reaches of the Internet between Iran, Israel and the US, and their online sympathisers.
They may use keyboards instead of rifles but Iran’s hackers, who have fought Israel in the digital shadows for years, are among the most battle-hardened soldiers Tehran can call on.
“The Iranians are throwing everything they have at this,” said Chris Krebs, who as a former director of the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) was one of the most senior civilian US cyber security officials.
“It is all hands on deck,” Krebs said. “If their cyber operators are breathing, then they will be on their keyboards.”
Their aims vary wildly, from sowing fear to causing chaos, hoovering up intelligence and isolating missile targets. In the murky world of cyber warfare it is hard to tell who even has the upper hand.
But winning in cyber space has become so critical to shaping perceptions and damaging enemy morale that Iran has invested heavily in efforts to pierce American and Israeli firewalls.
Iran has three different levels of cyber operators, whose boundaries are often blurry, analysts and former officials said.
The most experienced are run directly by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. They maintain a dizzying array of front organisations, used to introduce plausible deniability for attacks and issue public threats.