Tehran, Iran, July 2
By Mehdi Sepahvand – Trend:
A bot has hacked a large number of Iranian users of the country’s second largest mobile phone operator MTN Irancell.
The hacked population was 20, equal to 75 percent of all the MTN Irancell users, Mehr news agency reported July 2.
A message appeared the night earlier saying that there was a bot in Telegram messaging app named @MTNProBot where one could insert an Irancell phone number and it could provide one with the personal information of the owner such as first and last name, landline phone number, national code, city, address and postal code.
Spokesman for Iranian ICT ministry Mohammad Reza Farnaqizad said a few hours later that the bot was blocked. Telegram had banned the bot.
According to the information, the bot had been available for 20 hours. There are about 40 million smart phones in Iran and Telegram is one of the hottest apps in the country.
Sources said the database was hacked three years ago and it was being sold to the private advertising agencies or any entity that needed this kind of information.
This new event appeared just a few days after a number of Iranian governmental organizations were hacked, including the Civil Registration Organization, the Post of Iran, and a number of universities.
Three years ago the information of three million Iranian people’s banking access cards were published on a webblog.
Irancell is the second largest mobile operator in Iran. It is 49 percent owned by the South Africa-based MTN Group. It worked very well since they launched in 2005, to the point that it brought competition to the market and shook MCI, the largest mobile network operator Iran.
An Internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering (web crawler), in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human.