Documents recently obtained by hactivists from the Iranian presidency servers show that the Atomic Energy Organization was allowed to take hectares of land.
The hacktivist group produced documents in May showing that it breached 120 servers of the presidential office, getting access to internal communications, meetings minutes, President Ebrahim Raisi’s online conference platforms and about 1,300 computers inside the offices.
The MEK-affiliated Telegram account Uprising till Overthrow has been releasing the documents on its social media accounts. The latest report shows that 190 hectares of government-controlled land in the southern city of Khorramshahr on the Persian Gulf was given freely to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).
The head of the Atomic Energy Organization claimed in a letter to First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber that in order to "accelerate the process of exploration and extraction of uranium ore throughout Iran", the government laws should be changed in this regard.
In one of the documents, the security chief of Fordow nuclear plant -- an Iranian underground uranium enrichment facility located 20 miles (32 km) northeast of the Iranian city of Qom – had asked for about 150 hectares of public land to be given to the nuclear facility to increase its security buffer zone as work continued to expand Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Earlier in May, the group Uprising till Overthrow also hacked into the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry servers, disabling 210 sites and online services and leaking another large batch of documents.
In the new cyberattack, the group is said to have gained access to “tens of thousands confidential documents” but has so far released some of them. The number of the published documents is still so large that analyzing them will take weeks.
The hacker group also published a document that contains information about the request of the Atomic Energy Organization to import 35 vehicles with an engine capacity of more than 2,500 cc.
Hassan Rouhani, President Raisi's predecessor, had banned the import of Completely Built Units (CBUs) in July 2018, allowing only Completely Knocked-Down (CKDs), which are imported in parts rather than assembled.
Any official organization needs to receive foreign currency from the government and permission to import vehicles or machinery, but cars are particularly tightly regulated, because of the cost for the government in hard currencies.
The difficulty with obtaining US dollars or euros for imports became acute after former US President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal and imposed tough sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, the main source of its revenues.
With French automakers withdrawing from the Iranian market after the imposition of the US sanctions, CKD imports of a variety of Chinese vehicles have flooded the market since then.
The group also claimed that their access to the internal systems of the president’s office was so vast that they sent e-mails to the office’s recipients address list with photos of the leaders of MEK and photos of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Raisi with red crosses over them as well as slogans of “Death to Khamenei” and “Hail to Rajavi”, the current leader of the opposition group.
The president’s office immediately reacted, denying that “the official website of the president” was down due to any attack.
Among the released documents, there is correspondence between the president’s office and the office of the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) under besmirched chief Ali Shamkhani, confirming rumors that the regime's top security chief was forced out after the President said he had failed to do enough to quash riots, despite killing over 500 civilians and arresting more than 20,000.