Two bullets to the heart have terminated the life of Iran’s chief of cyberwarfare, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Mojtaba Ahmadi, commander of Iran’s Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, northwest of Tehran. “‘I could see two bullet wounds on his body and the extent of his injuries indicated that he had been assassinated from a close range with a pistol,’” reported the Telegraph, citing an eyewitness report posted on Alborz, a Web site that the newspaper said is linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
In a macabre twist, Alborz users have also posted warnings not to leave condolences on the Web site, for fear of disclosing more information to potential assassins. Iran will likely point a finger at Israel, as it does for every other mishap from sabotaged nuclear centrifuges to a tree falling down in Tehran. But if the eyewitness report on Alborz is correct, and two men on a motorbike did carry out the killing, then this fits a pattern. Several Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated, and many observers outside Iran point the finger at Israel’s Mossad spy agency. by whom many observers believe was the Mossad. The favored technique of the killers? Using a motorcycle to either shoot the victim, or attach a magnetic bomb to the victim’s car.
What is interesting is that instead of nuclear scientists, now Iran’s cyberwarfare experts are the target. Given that Western and Israeli operations against Iran’s nuclear program have increasingly turned to cyber weapons such as the Stuxnet virus, it is logical to target Iran’s capability to either defend against cyberattacks or to mount cyberwarfare operations against Western and Israeli targets. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the Revolutionary Guards are believed to be helping the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Syrian government hacker group that has mounted high-visibility attacks against targets such as the New York Times and the U.S. Marine Corps.
If the assassination of Iran’s cyberwar head was conducted by the Israelis (and if not Israel, then it’s almost certain that some other government ordered this killing), then it is likely that more killings will follow. The next chapter in cyberwarfare may be written with bullets, not bytes.
