From Cyber Bases to the Release of Security News
The Ins and Outs of Cyber Activities in the Virtual Space
From Cyber Bases to the Release of Security News, the internet has become one of the essential needs for life these days. From online stores to entertainment pages and news releases, if you are active on X, formerly Twitter, you have surely seen that everyone, regardless of their political views, tweets there. From news sites and local accounts to personal pages belonging to opponents and supporters of the government.
So far, everything seems natural, but the story gets strange when there are accounts that tweet aggressively in support of the Islamic Republic and a specific group like the Stability Front. Most of these tweets are in full support and praise of the government. A significant portion of these accounts operate with fake identities, and even the profile pictures do not belong to them.
The story becomes frightening when these accounts are directed by cyber bases and have considerable funding behind them. The main activity of these base accounts is forming Twitter teams in such a way that they create a group on Telegram or one of the Iranian messengers like Eitaa and add individuals who are aligned with them to that group.
The way these individuals get acquainted with these cyber teams is that several accounts send out a single tweet for group membership, and accounts interested in joining send a message to the account owner and then join the group. Now it’s time to exploit the created teams. They send their tweets in these groups, and all group members, even without reading the tweet, retweet, like, and comment on it.
Activity on Twitter is only a part of the activities of cyber bases. For example, there are many channels with the name Jihad of Clarification on the Eitaa messenger and even Telegram, which regularly produce content and attract new people. Cyber bases even have media at their disposal. Channels like Baseemchi Media, Secret Online, Radar of Revolution, and others on Telegram are among the channels belonging to these bases.
The noteworthy point is that sometimes these channels publish news and photos that are only available to security agencies. For example, minutes after the arrest of Mehdi Yarahi, a Telegram channel named Ayoon published photos of the moment this pop singer was arrested. The release of these photos caused many reactions to the extent that the head of the judiciary, without directly referring to this incident, said that publishing photos of the moment of arrest without the judge’s permission is against the law.
The stranger point is that almost two weeks after the publication of these photos, the Ayoon Telegram channel was permanently closed. It is almost never clear which base these channels are affiliated with, but their behavior pattern is consistent. For instance, they are very radical and demand harsh treatment of all protesters and do not tolerate any criticism.
Fabricating cases is another of their common behaviors. For example, they publish a tweet from a journalist inside the country and, without any evidence, accuse that person of espionage, and no action is taken against them by the judiciary and security agencies.
In the end, we must say that users should be extremely cautious of cyber activities because they can easily spread fake and false news due to the power they have in the virtual space and deceive the audience.
