Iranian Foreign Ministry responds to accusations

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kenani said the ministry’s official website had been hacked.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kenani said the ministry’s official website had been hacked and denied allegations that documents and a database had been seized.

According to Iran’s official news agency IRNA, Kenani made a statement about the hacking of the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Kenani stated that the site’s interface had been cyberattacked and noted that the necessary precautions had been taken and all of the service’s systems were actively open for public use.

Kenani said: “The information posted on social media that it belongs to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is false and baseless. This has nothing to do with what is happening today (cyber attack) and is just an exaggeration in the media.”

According to Iranian media reports, the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs went down for some time as a result of an attack by a hacker group. The group that carried out the attack claimed to have obtained many of the ministry’s confidential documents.

The information seized was said to include identity documents, ministry correspondence, phone numbers and a list of thousands of ministry employees.

The main page of the hacked site for some time displayed the phrase “Death to Khamenei, long live Rajevi” along with photographs of the leaders of the Mujahideen People’s Organization, considered a terrorist organization in the country.

A hacker group called “Kıyam ta Serneguni” (“Qiyam to the Fallen”) previously claimed to have seized 200,000 files and documents by hacking the website of the Islamic Institute of Culture and Communication.