My Blog

My team and I discovered this morning that several official Iranian news sites were down after a Facebook note went out telling supporters to download a file that would cause denial of service and crash the sites. From the article I just wrote and posted on Al Arabiya about the hacking, which followed just a day after Iran officials closed Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau for a week.

"Iranians sympathetic to reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, who lost his election bid against the incumbent president, fought back against a government crackdown on media by hacking official news websites Sunday.

Activists dissatisfied with what they say were fraudulent elections that saw President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad elected to a second term with a landslide 63 percent of the vote, organized a denial of service campaign through Facebook that caused the websites of several official news agencies to crash.

The official IRNA and FARS news agencies websites could not be displayed for several hours in the morning, Press TV’s site delivered a server busy message while the official parliament site, Majlis.ir, gave an unending still working message.

The websites of IRIB, the official broadcaster, Sepah News, the Revolutionary Guards newspaper and Kehan, the conservative government mouthpiece, were also unavailable.

A note posted on Facebook urged supporters dissatisfied with the vote results to download a file called “giveourvoteback” that would send requests to the various official websites effectively creating a denial of service because of too many server requests and crashing the sites.

Facebook, used by supporters of rival reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi to rally support, was blocked in the weeks leading up to the election and in the wake of post-election demonstrations. But Iranians at home, using proxies, and abroad fought back by causing the denial of service of several official government news sites. The campaign came amid the third day of violent protests and a continued government crackdown on the media, especially foreign press." (for the rest of the article click here)

So... yesterday Iran told Al Arabiya that we would not be able to broadcast from Tehran for the next week. Conveniently this would prevent coverage of the enormous protests that have wracked the capital and other cities for the past three days since the election results were announced. Reports are that they are the biggest in a decade if not since the Islamic Revolution in Iran...