Tech
US accuses Iran’s government of operating hacktivist group that hacked Stryker
The U.S. Justice Department accused Iran’s government of being behind the hacktivist group Handala, which last week claimed responsibility for the destructive cyberattack against the U.S. medical tech giant Stryker.
In a press release published on Thursday, the Justice Department said Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) is operating Handala.
The Justice Department called the group a fake activist persona that the Iranian ministry used to carry out “psychological operations” against the regime’s enemies, to claim responsibility for cyberattacks, and to publish stolen information obtained during those hacks. The group also called for the killing of journalists, regime dissidents, and Israeli persons, per the DOJ.
The announcement came hours after the FBI seized two websites linked to Handala, as first reported by TechCrunch. The group used the websites to publicize its alleged cyberattacks, as well as to publish the personal information of dozens of people who allegedly worked for the Israeli military and defense contractors.
Handala took credit on its website for the March 11 cyberattack on Stryker, during which the hackers remotely wiped tens of thousands of employee devices. The hackers said the breach was in retaliation for a U.S. air strike on an Iranian school, which killed 168 children, according to Iranian officials.
FBI director Kash Patel was quoted in the DOJ’s press release as saying that the FBI “took down four of their operation’s pillars and we’re not done.”
Apart from the two websites used by Handala, the DOJ also seized two other domains allegedly used by Iran’s MOIS via another hacktivist persona calling themselves “Justice Homeland” or “Homeland Justice.” The DOJ accused Iranian government hackers of using those two domains to claim responsibility for hacking the Albanian government in 2022, in a cyberattack that resulted in government servers being taken offline and the theft of sensitive data. Microsoft also linked the attack against the Albanian government to the MOIS.
In an affidavit submitted in court to support the seizure of Handala’s websites, the FBI said that Handala, Justice Homeland, and another hacktivist persona called Karma Below, “are part of the same conspiracy because they are operated by the same individuals.”
Contact Us
Do you have more information about Handala, or other Iran-linked hacking operations? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram, Keybase and Wire @lorenzofb, or by email.
Handala responded to the DOJ’s announcement in a statement posted on its official Telegram channel, where the hackers called the U.S. government actions “nothing more than the latest desperate attempts by the United States and its allies to silence the voice of Handala.”
DomainTools’ cybersecurity researcher Keith O’Neill told TechCrunch that Handala has already set up new domains that have not yet been seized.
The hacking group did not respond to a request for comment sent to a chat account publicized by the hackers, as well as an email address identified by the Justice Department in its affidavit.
A spokesperson for Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Stryker also did not respond to a request for comment.
Alex Orleans, the head of threat intelligence at Sublime Security who has tracked Iranian hackers for years, told TechCrunch that it is possible that the people behind the Handala persona are not the same individuals doing the actual hacking.
“Handala does not necessarily equate, one-to-one, with the actors conducting the activities it’s taking credit for,” said Orleans. “There could be multiple teams conducting actual intrusions while a distinct team is responsible for maintaining the persona — with all of these distinct elements coexisting within a larger unified MOIS element.”
“There’s a level of opacity there that can be difficult to penetrate,” he said.
Tech
Glean’s top line crosses $300M as AI budget cutting becomes its major selling point
Glean, a company often described as the Google for enterprise, said it has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a three-fold increase from the $100 million milestone it reached just 15 months ago.
While many AI startups are growing at a blistering pace, Glean’s progress is particularly remarkable. After years of essentially being the only player in the category, the seven-year-old startup is accelerating its growth as tech giants enter the enterprise AI search market with rival products.
“The first four or five years of our existence, we had no competition,” Glean CEO Arvind Jain told TechCrunch. “Given how important search is to make AI work in the enterprise, every single company in the world wants to be in this space.”
Tech heavyweights building Glean-like tools include Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Atlassian.
Jain maintains there’s value in being a first mover in the space, but that it’s also equally important to offer a better product.
What Glean does better than its competition, according to Jain, comes down to the deep understanding that its AI tools have of customers’ business needs. Glean’s AI achieves this knowledge — a concept captured by the new, popular term “context graph” — by connecting to and learning from enterprises’ internal software systems.
Jain claims that Glean’s context graph also helps enterprises cut AI computing costs.
“If you connect your AI to Glean, it gives you all the information that you need to do your work, and that results in AI consuming far fewer tokens compared to if you unleash AI onto your systems directly,” Jain said. That’s because with Glean, AI ends up performing fewer operations, he added.
At a time when many companies are blowing through their AI budgets, those token cost savings have become a major selling point for the company.
“One of the things you know our customers really like about Glean is the fact that we can reduce your AI bill significantly,” he said.
The company, which was last valued at $7.2 billion when it raised a $150 million Series F last June, offers various pricing structures to its customers, which include Databricks, Reddit, Pinterest, and Samsung.
According to Jain, Glean offers both a consumption-based model, where clients pay per use, and a hybrid model that combines a fixed monthly fee for active users with separate usage fees for model consumption.
Glean is definitely not the first company to do this, but it’s worth pointing out that the company’s $300 million milestone cannot be fully described as traditional ARR, because a consumption model by definition doesn’t have a strictly recurring component.
Pure consumption pricing models depend on fluctuating user activity rather than predictable subscription renewals, therefore a portion of Glean’s top line is more accurately described as an annualized revenue run rate.
Glean did not immediately respond to a request for comment; this post will be updated if the company replies.
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Tech
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