Boosting cyber skills, Iran apparently tried to track US military personnel via phones — report

Monitor says wave of signals sent to telecommunications network appears to have been attempt to locate devices; CENTCOM says protection measures are in place

Iran apparently tried to locate US personnel in the Middle East via their cellphone devices, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing researchers who documented a surge in tracking activity during the recent war.

Mobile Surveillance Monitor, a group that researches mobile espionage, said that with the start of the joint US-Israel air campaign against Iran at the end of February, it detected a leap in signals requesting information about the location of devices in the region. The signals were sent via SS7 protocols, exploiting a weakness in the low-security telecommunications technology that dates from the 1970s.

According to Gary Miller, who founded the monitor, the signals appeared to target local networks, which are occasionally used by US military personnel.

The details and findings from MSM were first reported by the UK’s Financial Times newspaper.

Nikita Shah, a cybersecurity researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The New York Times that the development “signals a step up in sophistication” by Iran, which has “become quite creative in the last couple of years.”

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition

by email and never miss our top stories

By signing up, you agree to the terms

Asked about the issue, a US Central Command spokesman declined to give details on measures to protect the military from Iranian phone-tracking activities.

CENTCOM told the Financial Times that it took “unprecedented force-protection measures… to ensure that our forces remain safe.”

An unnamed US official told the FT that any claim that tracking data was significant in Iran’s targeting of US military personnel “is a departure from the facts.”

Iran repeatedly claimed missile and drone strikes on US military sites during the fighting.

In April, CENTCOM told Congress it had received “multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel,” the FT said.

The following month, over a dozen members of Congress sent a letter to the Defense Department raising concerns that the US military was not doing enough to protect its members from cyber threats during the war, The Times reported.

In another indication of Iranian prowess in cyber warfare, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in April that Iranian cyberattacks on government services and water and energy systems had caused “operational disruption and financial loss,” The Times said.

Iran-linked hackers publicly claimed in March that they had breached FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal inbox, publishing photographs of the US investigative agency director and other documents on the internet.

The same group, which calls itself Handala, claimed in June to have breached FBI drones and threatened to target the World Cup soccer championship.

The US State Department has offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification of members of the group.

If you’d like to comment, join

The Times of Israel Community.