The Israeli company Dream disclosed Friday evening that an Iranian cyberattack penetrated Middle Eastern diplomatic networks with the goal of disrupting the Cairo ceasefire talks and undermining efforts to reach a hostage deal.
According to the company, the hackers exploited the real email account of an employee at the Omani Embassy in Paris, from which they sent messages disguised as legitimate diplomatic correspondence.
The messages, which appeared to contain harmless Word documents, were embedded with malicious code that granted the Iranian hackers access to sensitive negotiations. Among the recipients were Egyptian mediators involved in ceasefire efforts, as well as representatives from the United States and Qatar.
Dream said it was able to track the entire operation using proprietary tools based on language models for cybersecurity and autonomous artificial intelligence agents. These agents analyzed the malicious activity in real time, linked domain addresses and command-and-control servers, and identified the group behind the attack. According to the company, this mapping could allow authorities to disrupt and even neutralize the attackers' operations.
The firm stressed that the uniqueness of the attack lay not only in its technical sophistication, but also in its targeting of diplomatic trust as a strategic objective. It compared the incident to a 2023 cyberattack in Albania also attributed to Iran, describing it as part of a broader pattern in which cyber tools are being deployed to sabotage diplomatic processes.
Dream's founder and CEO said: "We realized that cybersecurity is a vital component of national security. This discovery once again proves that Middle East conflicts are being waged not only on the ground, but also in the digital sphere".
The company's vice president for AI and cybersecurity, Tal Filkov, added that the use of autonomous artificial intelligence agents enables, for the first time, full real-time investigation and mapping of a state-sponsored cyberattack, providing nations with a clear defensive edge against such complex campaigns.
