US Marines stationed across the Persian Gulf have been receiving WhatsApp messages from strangers suggesting they name residence and make their closing goodbyes.
The messages, which started arriving on Monday, got here signed by the Iran-linked Handala hacking group, that has spent a lot of 2026 attacking US and Israeli targets.
In accordance with media stories, messages despatched to marines at Naval Assist Exercise Bahrain learn:
“Your identities are absolutely recognized to our missile items, and each transfer you make is below our surveillance. Very quickly, you’ll be focused by our Shahed drones and Kheibar and Ghadeer missiles… We propose you name your households now and say your closing goodbyes.”
The messages reportedly arrived from a Bahraini cellphone quantity registered to an area enterprise – most definitely as a result of it had been spoofed or hijacked.
A day later, the Handala hacking crew took to its Telegram channel to announce that it had revealed the names and cellphone numbers of two,379 US Marines stationed within the Persian Gulf. The group additionally boasted that it is aware of the house addresses and household particulars, in addition to day by day commutes, purchasing habits, and “nightly leisure actions” of tens of hundreds of US navy personnel within the area.
Handala, which first surfaced in late 2023, presents itself as a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group. The US Division of Justice, nevertheless, publicly identifies it as a canopy operation for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Safety.
In current months the group has been very energetic, with a highly-publicised assault on US medical expertise agency Stryker which noticed tens of hundreds of units wiped, in addition to the breach of FBI Director Kash Patel’s private Gmail account.
Handala’s claims cannot be taken utterly at face worth. There’s a lengthy historical past of state-sponsored hacking teams recycling outdated breaches, padding leaks with publicly-available info, and presenting incidents as an intelligence coup. Briefly, it’s fairly doable that what Handala “is aware of” in regards to the US Marines could nicely have been scraped from information brokers and social media fairly than have been gathered lately from safe techniques.
However that does not negate the purpose that the purpose of a marketing campaign like that is to scare and destabilise members of the US armed forces. If a Marine receives a WhatsApp message naming them and threatening their household, it does probably not matter the place the information got here from.
Briefly, hackers whether or not concentrating on common members of the general public or the armed forces will usually attempt to short-circuit your judgement, and fluster you into taking rash choices, by making threats that they could don’t have any means to place into motion.
