A temporary traffic sign perched on the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles appears to have been hacked earlier this month to display a link to a pro-Iran website.
Real estate broker Payam Shirazi said he spotted the sign by the Santa Monica Boulevard exit while driving north from his home in Irvine to L.A. for a business meeting, and snapped a photo of the displayed link — “www.goorkan.info” — because he recognized the Farsi word “goorkan,” which means “gravedigger.”
When Shirazi visited the website, he said he was startled to see images of other Iranians living in the U.S. and Canada, including several he knows personally, who had protested against Iran’s government and in support of the war the U.S. and Israel launched earlier this year.
The website described a campaign to “identify and punish traitors to the homeland” and “supporters of hostile actions against the soil and people of Iran,” according to screenshots taken by Shirazi and reviewed by The Times.
Colleen Park, a spokesperson for the California Department of Transportation, wrote in an email that the message sign had been placed for a pavement rehabilitation project in the Sepulveda Pass, and that the agency was alerted about an “unauthorized message” Sept. 15, at which point an agency contractor was prompted to remove it.
A “field investigation of the message and access history is ongoing,” Park said.
The database of photos and names of protesters shown in the screenshots has since been removed from the website, and was replaced in recent days with language accusing activists supporting the war of being a part of an “Israeli intelligence project,” though it did not cite specific evidence.
Emel Karsaz, an Iranian woman living in the Los Angeles area who was previously featured on the website, told the California Post that she was shocked to discover her name, photograph and personal information had been shared on the website, and that she had filed a report with the FBI. The FBI’s Los Angeles office did not respond to a request for comment.
The incident comes amid heightened tensions and competing narratives within the Iranian American community, which has grown increasingly polarized in recent years. Persian-language online influence campaigns linked to Israel by Canadian researchers last year have helped stoke pro-war sentiment in the diaspora and amplified Iranian opposition figure Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah and a longtime exile in the U.S. The dynamic has led to online smear campaigns as well as the Trump administration’s detention and deportation of some Iranian families.
The period since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February has been fraught with warnings of potential cyber interference.
An Israel-based cybersecurity firm attributed a March cyberattack that forced Los Angeles’ transit system to shut down parts of its network to an Iranian operation. L.A. Metro officials have said their investigation was ongoing and that they did not yet know who was behind the breach.
Federal authorities investigating breaches of municipal water systems in Minnesota in July and cyberattacks on energy tankers bound for Texas in August have also pointed to Iran-linked hackers as potential culprits.
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