Murdoch website hacked by Iranian Cyber Army

The website of the popular Iranian satellite channel Farsi1, co-owned by Robert Murdoch, was reportedly hacked this Wednesday by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army, which is thought to operate under the aegis of the all-powerful Revolutionary Guard.

The hacking was timed for the start of the Muslim festival of Eid - otherwise known as the festival of sacrifice.

The screenshot above, which has been widely shown on Iranian news sites, shows Farsi1's website successfully hijacked and emblazoned with the message 'Happy Eid Ghorban'.

The hackers then write: "Rupert Murdoch, the Moby company, the Mohseni family, and the Zionists' partners should know that they will take the wish to destroy the structure of Iranian families with them to the grave."

The 'Moby company' referred to is the Moby Media Group, run by Saad Mohseni, an Afghan-Australian who returned to Kabul in 2002 to set up what is now the country's most high-profile media group. He was described in a New Yorker profile earlier this year as "Afghanistan's first media mogul".

Moby runs Farsi1 in partnership with Star TV, the Hong Kong-based TV service owned by Murdoch's News Corp.

Farsi1 has been constantly criticised by the Iranian regime, which sees its mix of comedy, soap opera and US-born programming as corrupting and destructive of family life.

Tonight at 10pm, for instance, the channel is showing the latest episode in its Farsi-language version of 24, with Keifer Sutherland as Jack Bauer - a man not shy about torturing the bad guys, who, as often as not, come from the Middle East.  

As for the Iranian Cyber Army, according to the Persian Letters blog on Radio Free Europe's website, it is almost certain that it is run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

A senior Revolutionary Guard officer, Ebrahim Jabbari, is quoted as saying in May this year that in response to "efforts by the enemy to inflict a blow on the Islamic state through various means" the Iranian Cyber Army had "powerfully entered this arena to prevent any damage to the cultural-social infrastructure of the country".

He didn't claim ownership of the Cyber Army, but he did say in a separate statement that the Revolutionary Guard had been "successful" in setting up the second-biggest cyber army in the world.

Of course, Radio Free Europe is run by the US government with the sole purpose of "promoting democracy" in those countries where "the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed". Until the early 1970s it was actually funded by the CIA. ·