Iran sends mass text message to Israelis, inviting them to share intelligence |
Iran sent a batch of messages to many Israeli cellphone users overnight Monday, inviting them to cooperate on intelligence, in what Israel’s National Cyber Directorate said was an attempt to “create panic.”
Among the Hebrew-language messages were notifications telling Israelis they can contact Iranian embassies or provide information about sensitive sites by marking them on an online map.
In a statement, the Cyber Directorate said it was a “familiar attempt to influence” and said the “threatening, dramatic, and worrying messages” were aimed at causing recipients “to act out of fear.”
One message reportedly sent to users said: “We assured you that soon you will see stars in the night sky that aren’t stars… soon you will see the sun in night skies,” in an apparent reference to Iranian missile attacks on Israel.
The directorate warned those who received the messages not to respond to them, click on any links included, or forward the messages to anyone else.
The directorate also said that receiving such a message doesn’t mean that a user’s phone or account has been hacked. It noted that while some messages appeared to come from organizations, among them IntelOP, Apocalypse, and BibiAlerts, that was only due to the way the messaging system was........