Iranian Espionage Group Caught Spying on Kurdish Officials

BladedFeline Hackers Spying on Kurdish Officials Since at Least 2017 Jayant Chakravarti (@JayJay_Tech) • June 5, 2025

An Iranian state espionage group stayed hidden for more than half-a-decade until security researchers spotted it in 2023, researchers said Thursday in a report detailing a growing arsenal of hacking tools it deployed against Kurdish and Iraqi government officials.

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Cybersecurity company Eset said telemetry shows the threat group it tracks as BladedFeline has been active since at least 2017. Eset first observed it in 2023, when it planted a backdoor into systems used by government diplomats from the Kurdistan Regional Government, a semi-autonomous region of Northern Iraq.

The group has expanded its toolset beyond the backdoor to include reverse tunnels and supplementary tools to exfiltrate information from hijacked devices to its command ...