Science and Technology

gatestoneinstitute.org – There is no gloating about death, but the Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh…. was not the scientist who discovered the anti-coronavirus vaccine, but the scientist called the father of the Iranian nuclear bomb…” — Tareq Al-Hameed, Saudi author, Okaz, November 30, 2020. “[H]ow can they condemn the killing of a man who devoted his life to making a sinister bomb …

Al-Arabia – The US Justice Department has seized a website belonging to Iraq’s paramilitary Badr Organization in what one expert said is part of a broader US attempt to pressure Iran-backed groups in the country. “There’s been much more pressure on the groups as a whole,” Phillip Smyth, an analyst at the Washington Institute told Al Arabiya English. The latest …

iranwire.com – For the first time, Canada has formally named Iran as being among the biggest cyber-threats to the country, alongside state-sponsored hackers from China, Russia and North Korea. On Wednesday, November 18, 2020, the Communications Security Establishment’s (CSE) Canadian Centre for Cyber Security published its second ever National Cyber Threat Assessment report (NCTA), in which the agency explicitly names the …

In recent years, barely a week has passed without a media appearance of Amirali Hajizadeh, the media-savvy commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force. Charming, gregarious and always wearing a smile, Hajizadeh doesn’t miss any opportunity to talk about drones, domestic car production and the rapid growth of Iran’s missile force while carefully ignoring more inconvenient topics such as the downing …

(AP) — Iran on Thursday passed the grim milestone of 40,000 coronavirus deaths, with the latest 10,000 added in less than a month, as the country struggles to contain its most widespread wave of infection yet. The Iranian health ministry announced 457 new fatalities on Thursday, along with 117,517 new infections, pushing the total case count past 726,000, although officials …

Al-Monitor – Facebook removed several accounts purportedly from Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood for coordinated activity they each conducted in October. The social media giant released its October 2020 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report on Thursday. Facebook defines such behavior as “coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central to the operation.” To this …

VOA – Some of the data Iran used to unleash a deluge of emails designed to intimidate U.S. voters just weeks before the country’s presidential election came directly from one state’s voter registration database. U.S. officials confirmed the finding late Friday in an alert issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), …

RFL/RE – The founder and manager of Iran’s main video-sharing platform, referred to by some as Iran’s YouTube, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after being convicted of “encouraging corruption” over a video posted by a user. In the video posted on Aparat.com last year, children were asked whether they know how they were born, Iranian media reported. …

RFL/RE – Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization says it has been targeted by cyberattacks, after officials reported the hacking of two institutions in the country earlier this week.“Sworn enemies have been trying for some time to carry out cyberattacks,” the organization said in a statement on October 16, adding that “appropriate” measures had been taken to prevent an interruption of its missions.No …

(Reuters) – Hackers launched large-scale attacks on two Iranian government institutions this week, a senior official said on Thursday, without giving details on the targets or the suspected perpetrators. Some government bodies had since temporarily shut down internet services as a precaution, Abolghasem Sadeghi, from the government’s Information Technology Organization, told state TV. “The cyber attacks which happened on Monday …