American computing giant Microsoft said on Friday (February 3) that it identified Iranian state actors behind the cyber attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Last month, a group of hackers called “Holy Souls” announced that they had obtained the personal information of over 200,000 Charlie Hebdo customers and went on to publish a sample of the data as proof. In a social media post, the hackers said they would sell the information for 20 bitcoins ($470,000)

The cyber attack came following the newspaper publishing cartoons of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a special edition to mark the anniversary of the 2015 attack on its Paris offices which killed 12 and injured 11. Earlier, Iran publicly vowed an “effective response” to the “insulting” cartoons. 

On Friday, Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s Digital Threat Analysis Center, said that Holy Souls were Iranian cybersecurity firm Emennet Pasargad, news agency AFP reported on Friday. The firm was the employer of two Iranians, Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazemi and Sajjad Kashian, who had been indicted by the United States Justice Department in 2021. 

During the 2020 presidential elections in the US, Kazemi and Kashian allegedly carried out a cyber campaign to intimidate and influence American voters, and otherwise undermine voter confidence and sow discord. According to the Justice Department, they allegedly obtained confidential voter information and sent menacing emails, pushing out false information to influence both Democratic and Republican voters, and also attempted to hack into state voting-related websites. Iran denied these claims. 

“Whatever one may think of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial choices, the release of personally identifiable information about tens of thousands of its customers constitutes a grave threat,” Microsoft said in a statement on Friday. 

Microsoft added that the Iranian hackers used Twitter accounts with fake or stolen identities to criticise cartoons of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Two accounts impersonating a Charlie Hebdo editor and a technology executive also posted the leaked data before Twitter banned them. 

(With inputs from agencies)

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