The armed conflicts are no longer confined to territories. They are now also happening in the digital space, where information can destabilize almost as quickly as a strike. The hijacking of a religious application in Iran provides a clear example of how cyber warfare infiltrates everyday use to influence minds.
Spiritual application turned into an influence lever At the early hours of a morning marked by strikes from the United States and Israel, millions of Iranians received an unusual notification. The BadeSaba Calendar app, downloaded over five million times for prayer times, stopped its religious reminders. At 9:52 am, Tehran time, alerts titled “Help is on the way” started appearing rapidly.
For over thirty minutes, screens displayed calls to the Iranian armed forces. Some messages stated that “the time of judgment has come” and urged military personnel to lay down their arms in exchange for amnesty. Others promised protection and forgiveness to those who joined what was presented as a liberation movement. The synchronization with explosions heard in several cities reinforced the impression of a coordinated operation.
According to information reported by Hackread, the notifications were specifically targeting members of the army. Wired’s article confirmed that the messages translated from Farsi called on soldiers to “join the forces of liberation” and to “defend their brothers”, while promising forgiveness to those who stopped fighting. No group claimed responsibility for the attack at the time.
Cyber warfare infiltrates daily life infrastructures This hack demonstrates how cyber warfare now exploits everyday digital tools. The goal is to produce an immediate psychological impact. Morey Haber, a security advisor at BeyondTrust, believes that an attack of this magnitude is not improvised. According to him, the authors likely compromised systems beforehand and then triggered the messages at a strategic moment.
The difficulty of attribution reinforces this impression. Narges Keshavarznia, a researcher in digital rights at the Miaan Group, pointed out that it is too early to identify the perpetrators and that attribution remains complex in this type of operation. In contemporary conflicts, the line between state actors and militant groups becomes blurred.
The incident is part of a broader trend where alert systems and information platforms become targets. In October 2023, hackers diverted the Israeli Red Alert app to send false missile alerts. Indeed, other public screens have been hacked in the Middle East in recent years, showing that the battle for information is moving towards perceived neutral channels.
Digital blackout and loss of visibility in a tense country As the notifications circulated, national connectivity abruptly collapsed. NetBlocks organization noted that the Iranian network was only functioning at about 4 percent of its usual capacity. Data from the ArvanCloud Radar system indicated that several data centers were losing their connection to the international internet or experiencing significant disruptions.
When the internet goes dark, the ability to document events disappears with it. In this regard, Iranian residents have already experienced prolonged outages during the January protests, marked by the death of at least 3,117 civilians according to government figures. In this context, the repetition of these blackouts highlights that cyber warfare goes beyond mere technical intrusion to affect information control and collective perception.
