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Cyber warfare is coming out of the shadows in the Iran war. The U.S., Israel and Iran are spying, hacking and trying to deceive each other. NPR's Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv has this report.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: The U.S. military's very first move in the Iran war was in cyberspace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine told reporters.
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DAN CAINE: Coordinated space and cyber operations effectively disrupted communications and sensor networks across the area of responsibility, leaving the adversary without the ability to see, coordinate or respond effectively.
ESTRIN: Israel hacked Tehran's traffic cameras to track the Iranian supreme leader's moves before killing him. That's according to a senior Israeli defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Israel's cyber methods. As the Financial Times reported, Israel synthesized that footage and billions of data points to create a bank of targets in Iran. NPR has not independently confirmed that. Omer Benjakob is a cybersecurity reporter for the Israeli paper Haaretz.
OMER BENJAKOB: Israel used or very likely used very cutting-edge kind of data processing or big data fusion techniques that from a kind of layman or citizen perspective you would call AI.
ESTRIN: He believes Israel's military is developing its own independent AI systems to avoid the kind of clash happening now with the Trump administration, as the company Anthropic has tried to limit how the U.S. military uses its AI model, Claude, during war.
BENJAKOB: We need to, at least at some level, to be able to do some of this stuff independently because one day someone will discover we also use Claude. And then there will be a protest in San Francisco. And then they'll take Claude away from us. So we might as well just have our own version of Claude.
ESTRIN: Then there's psychological cyber warfare. Israeli authorities say Iran has recruited dozens of Israeli nationals over the Telegram messaging app in the last couple of years. Most of them paid to stir up strife in Israeli society, like to start random fires or write anti-government graffiti. Benjakob the journalist believes Iran recruited Israelis to threaten him after he reported on fake social media accounts Iran was running in Israel.
BENJAKOB: My wife got to her office a package with, like, a Jewish memorial candle. And I got some message, like, via WhatsApp telling me that if I don't stop what I'm doing, my wife will have to use this candle. So what we're seeing in Israel a lot is just people being tapped to kind of continue Iran's digital war against Israel in physical means.
ESTRIN: Israel does psychological cyber warfare, too. The senior official who spoke with NPR said Israel hacked a popular Muslim prayer app in Iran at the start of the war and sent messages calling on soldiers to defect. He said, after Israel bombed the notorious Evin prison in Iran last year, Israel sent videos of that bombing to Iranian officials to intimidate them. Israel also tried to trick Iran before launching the current war. Former military official Doron Hadar was a part of Israel's influence operations until recently.
DORON HADAR: What usually you are doing is try to influence the thinking of the rival entity to let him think that the moment is not coming soon.
ESTRIN: So white noise tactics were deployed against Iran, the current defense official told NPR. He said U.S. war planes were parked in southern Israel to distract from the covert Air Force attack that was being prepared from northern Israel. And the night the war was launched, he said, Israeli army generals didn't park their cars in their normal parking spaces at military headquarters, old-school deception in a high-tech war.
Daniel Estrin NPR News Tel Aviv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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