A video showing a journalist at Iran’s hardline Fars News Agency who is apparently masturbating at the agency’s office has gone viral on Iranian social media.
Alleged security camera footage leaked by hackers who targeted the IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency shows one of its employees in a compromising situation at work.
The group hacked the twitter account of Habib Torkashvand, one of the news agency’s managers and published the video on his account, captioning, “These are the freeloaders of Fars! At the beginning of every week, after coming to the office, they must check who has been at their desk the day before and jerked off!”
The agency has denied that the footage belongs to Fars News, however some users on Twitter have identified the person as one of the economic editors of the website.
The video shows the journo locking the door and then taking off his pants before playing a video to watch and masturbate.
His smoking and having potato chips while enjoying himself has become a fun topic for Iranian users on social media.
Since its creation, hardline Fars News has played a key role in promoting IRGC propaganda and waging psychological warfare against regime opponents.
The hacktivist group Black Reward announced on Friday [Nov. 25] that it had attacked the database of Fars News Agency claiming that it has deleted nearly 250 terabytes of data from all the servers and computers of the website.
Black Reward also said it has obtained the confidential bulletins and directives sent by the news agency to the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Based on the group’s statement, the hacked data includes all recorded calls, information on internal portals related to administrative conversations and news folders, image archives and financial documents of this news agency.
However, Fars says during the recent attack, hackers were only able to destroy the information and news from Friday, and other information and databases of the news agency were not hacked.
Various groups of anonymous hackers have targeted Iran’s government entities in recent years, publishing some confidential information or disrupting the state television’s programs and playing their own messages.
Back in October, Black Reward published a throve of documents from Iran’s nuclear program, after a 24-hour deadline it had given the government expired.
The group said it had hacked the email system of Iran’s Nuclear Power Production and Development company threatening that it will release the documents if the government did not stop its clampdown on protesters. It also said that a total of 50 GB data was obtained.
In the past weeks, Black Reward also hacked the e-mails of managers and employees of Press TV state channel, obtaining their personal information.
The hacker group, which says it is “part of the Iranian hacker community” and works “to confront the criminal clerical regime,” asked Press TV journalists to “be the voice of the people.”
Press TV claims it is the “voice of the voiceless” but it has recently been sanctioned by the European Union for “human rights violations.”
Black Reward had also hacked the emails of the employees of Al-Zahra University in Tehran and the Legal Medicine Organization of the country asking them to support the protesters.
After the start of anti-regime protests in mid-September, Black Reward, together with the hacker group called Tepandegan, sent millions of texts inviting people to participate in protest rallies.