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Sweden Says Iran was Behind Thousands of Text Messages Calling for Revenge over Quran Burnings

A Swedish man of Iraqi descent burns a copy of the Quran in front of a mosque in Stockholm. (AFP)
A Swedish man of Iraqi descent burns a copy of the Quran in front of a mosque in Stockholm. (AFP)
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Sweden Says Iran was Behind Thousands of Text Messages Calling for Revenge over Quran Burnings

A Swedish man of Iraqi descent burns a copy of the Quran in front of a mosque in Stockholm. (AFP)
A Swedish man of Iraqi descent burns a copy of the Quran in front of a mosque in Stockholm. (AFP)

Swedish authorities accused Iran on Tuesday of being responsible for thousands of text messages that were sent to people in the Scandinavian country calling for revenge over the burnings of the Quran in 2023.
According to officials in Stockholm, the cyberattack was carried out by Iran´s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which hacked an SMS service and sent "some 15,000 text messages in Swedish" over the string of public burnings of the Quran that took place over several months in the summer of 2023.
Senior prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said a preliminary investigation by Sweden´s SAPO domestic security agency showed "it was the Iranian state via the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC, that carried out a data breach at a Swedish company that runs a major SMS service."
The Swedish company was not named. There was no immediate comment from Iranian authorities on the accusations from Sweden.
In August 2023, Swedish media reported that a large number of people in Sweden had received text messages in Swedish calling for revenge against people who were burning the Quran.
Also in 2023, an Iraqi citizen living in Sweden set a copy of the Quran alight in front of the capital's largest mosque.

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Iranian Operatives Charged in the US with Hacking Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign

Signage is seen at the United States Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, DC, US, August 29, 2020. (Reuters)
Signage is seen at the United States Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, DC, US, August 29, 2020. (Reuters)
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Iranian Operatives Charged in the US with Hacking Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign

Signage is seen at the United States Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, DC, US, August 29, 2020. (Reuters)
Signage is seen at the United States Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, DC, US, August 29, 2020. (Reuters)

The Justice Department unsealed criminal charges Friday against three Iranian operatives suspected of hacking Donald Trump's presidential campaign and disseminating stolen information to media organizations.

The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents.

Multiple major news organizations that said they were leaked confidential information from inside the Trump campaign, including Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post, declined to publish it.

US intelligence officials subsequently linked Iran to a hack of the Trump campaign and to an attempted breach of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign.

They said the hack-and-dump operation was meant to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and potentially influence the outcome of elections that Iran perceives to be “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests."

Last week, officials also revealed that the Iranians in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails containing excerpts of the hacked information to people associated with the Biden campaign. None of the recipients replied.

The Harris campaign said the emails resembled spam or a phishing attempt and condemned the outreach to the Iranians as “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.”

The indictment comes at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran as Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel escalate attacks against each other, raising concerns about the prospect of an all-out war, and as US officials say they continue to track physical threats by Iran against a number of officials including Trump.