VERY IMPORTANT

Facebook threat intelligence analysts share actions they took against a group of hackers in Iran to disrupt their ability to use their infrastructure to abuse our platform, distribute malware and conduct espionage operations across the internet, targeting primarily the United States. This group is known in the security industry as Tortoiseshell, whose activity was previously reported to mainly focus on the information technology industry in the Middle East. In an apparent expansion of malicious activity to other regions and industries, our investigation found them targeting military personnel and companies in the defense and aerospace industries primarily in the US, and to a lesser extent in the UK and Europe. This group used various malicious tactics to identify its targets and infect their devices with malware to enable espionage.