(Bloomberg) — Sweden says it has uncovered an Iranian hacking operation that was designed to send text messages in an effort to deepen divisions in the Scandinavian country.
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Swedish prosecutors concluded that Iran was behind 15,000 text messages sent on Aug. 1, 2023, a statement said Tuesday. The messages sought to prompt recipients to take revenge on people who burned Islam’s holy book after a series of such incidents in Sweden, the prosecutor said. Part of the text read “those who insulted the Koran must pay,” according to numerous local media reports.
Although investigators were able to identify the Iranian hackers, Sweden dropped the investigation because it has no jurisdiction to prosecute them in Iran and cannot bring them to Sweden to face trial. Several phone calls and an email seeking comment from the Iranian embassy in Stockholm went unanswered during regular business hours.
The cyberattack came at a tense time. Sweden’s bid to join the NATO defense alliance was in jeopardy after a series of public Koran burnings that sparked outrage in parts of the Muslim world and angered Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who held the keys to Sweden’s accession to the bloc. Erdogan eventually dropped his opposition, and Sweden joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in March.
The case is an example of what Western authorities see as covert Iranian operations in Europe. It comes after it emerged earlier this month that a couple arrested in France are suspected of being involved in an Iranian plot to kill Jews in the country.
“The investigation shows that the Iranian state, through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, hacked a Swedish company that operates a major text messaging service,” Chief Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said in a statement. “The aim was to increase tensions and fuel existing conflicts between different groups in society.”
Two weeks after the messages were sent, Sweden raised its terror threat level to four on a scale of five, and in October of that year, two Swedish football fans were murdered in a terrorist attack in Brussels.
(Updates with an attempt to get comment from Iranian authorities in the third paragraph.)
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