Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking

Yash Aryan

July 15, 2020

An Iranian hacker group accidentally exposed 40 GB of their training videos online. Researchers at IBM's X-Force security team have reported finding roughly five hours of screen recordings of a hacker group known as 'APT35' or 'Charming Kitten,' one of the most active state-sponsored espionage teams linked to the Government of Iran. The videos were exposed due to a security setting misconfiguration on a virtual private cloud server being used by the group. The videos show the hackers targeting the staff of the US State Department and an unnamed Iranian-American philanthropist. The videos were mainly training materials for junior members, showing the hackers accessing compromised Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts to download their contents and exfiltrate other Google-hosted data from victims.

Abridged fromWIRED