A former US Air Force intelligence officer allegedly worked with Iranian hackers who used Facebook and e-mail to try to trick her former colleagues into downloading malware that would track their computer activity. Monica Witt was charged with espionage after she provided national defense information to the Iranian government, the US Department of Justice said Wednesday. Witt, a US citizen, defected to Iran in 2013 and is still at large. An indictment made public on Wednesday detailed how Witt and Iranian hackers used fake Facebook accounts to target US counterintelligence officials after she re-entered Iran. The world’s largest social network has been under pressure to do more to combat misinformation and continues to pull down fake accounts this year, including 783 pages, groups and accounts tied to Iran. Facebook said in a statement that the company didn’t have “anything to share beyond what’s in the Justice Department’s indictment” when asked if the social network found and pulled down the accounts. Witt used fake Facebook accounts to search for US counterintelligence officials on the social network, according to court documents. From December 2014 to May 2015, at least four Iranian nationals created fake Facebook accounts to target Witt’s former co-workers, the US alleges. Mojtaba Masoumpour, Behzad Mesri, Hossein Parvar and Mohamad Paryar got ahold of malware that tracks a person’s computer activity, accesses their web camera and captures what they type. Neither Witt nor the four men, who worked for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, could be contacted for comment because… [Read full story]
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