It shut down websites that threatened dissidents and took credit for hacks

March 19, 2026 / 11:26 PM EDT / CBS News
The Justice Department says it has shuttered four websites that were allegedly used by Iranian government-linked groups to post hacked information and threaten regime critics.

The move comes amid fears that the U.S.

and Israel's war with Iran could expand into cyberattacks.

A news agency linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards has threatened American tech companies that they could be targets, and one of the Iran-linked groups targeted by the Justice Department appeared to take credit for a hack on a Michigan medical technology company last week.

Meanwhile, U.S.

military officials have said cyber operations helped to degrade Iran's communications in the early hours of the war.

For example, the Handala sites were allegedly used to take credit for "a destructive malware attack against a U.S.-based multinational medical technologies firm."
The Justice Department didn't identify that firm, but last week, medical technology company Stryker reported a cyberattack that caused "global disruption." Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs wrote in a blog post last week that Handala appeared to claim responsibility for the incident, which was ostensibly in retaliation for a deadly bombing of a girls' school in Iran that early assessments say the U.S.

may have been responsible for.

Stryker said the hack was limited to its internal Microsoft systems and did not affect any of its products, including its medical implants.

CBS News has reached out to the company for comment.

And Handala was accused of emailing death threats earlier this month to Iranian dissidents and journalists, at least one of whom lived in the United States, the Justice Department said.

One alleged message that was disclosed by the Justice Department claimed Handala was "partners" with the Mexico-based Jalisco New Generation Cartel and offered a $250,000 reward for the target's death.

"Iran thought they could hide behind fake websites and keyboard threats to terrorize Americans and silence dissidents," FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement Thursday .

"We took down four of their operation's pillars and we're not done."
But when Stryker was targeted in a cyberattack last week, following the start of the U.S.-Iran war, former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs told CBS News it appeared that "the cyber front of this conflict has officially opened."
Krebs, a CBS News contributor, said on "CBS Mornings" last week that the line between Handala and the Iranian government is "really blurry."
"It's almost an all-hands-on-deck approach by Iran," he said.

"So all of their groups, whether they're directly related to the military, the intelligence services or their proxies, contractors, hacktivists, sympathizers, whatever you want to call them — they're all going for targets."