Rhianna King

Rhianna King is the Strategic CTI Team Lead at SecAlliance. She is a seasoned analyst from a conventional Military Intelligence background, with considerable work and management experience in multi-national, high-stakes environments. As the Strategic CTI Team Lead, Rhianna is responsible for running clients’ services, monitoring geo-political events and tracking nation state threat actors, as well as mentoring our more junior analysts. Outside of work, Rhianna is captain of the TechVets Capture the Flag (CTF) team and a member of Chatham House.

Talk: Investigating links between Iranian hacktivists and nation state groups – a concrete example

In September 2020, two Iranians were indicted by the US for defacing 51 US-hosted domains in January of that year. The defacements came immediately after the revered Iranian General Qasim Suleimani was assassinated in a US drone strike and featured his image, along with anti-US sentiment. Similar defacements continue to occur on the anniversary of the General’s assassination, with rumours suggesting that the hacktivist activity is linked to the Iranian government.

This presentation will walk through a 2021 investigation that sought to identify whether there are, in fact, links between the indicted individuals and the government. Next to that, the presentation will address whether activity related to the 2022 anniversary of the assassination differed from previous years.