Israel hacks prayer app to push propaganda to Iran: report • The Register

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/iran_prayer_app_propaganda_hack_israel/

Publish Date: 2026-03-02 15:11:00

Imagine your favorite app encouraging you to surrender during a war. That’s happening right now in Iran.

With the onset of open warfare, Israel reportedly hacked the popular prayer calendar app BadeSaba to distribute messages that, in another era, might have taken the form of pamphlets dropped from planes.

According to Reuters, app users received notifications stating “It’s time for reckoning” and urging members of the military to join the opposition to the regime.

The message, it’s claimed, was titled “Help has arrived.”

Hamid Kashfi, a security researcher and DarkCell founder, in a social media post said the app is an interesting target for reasons beyond its high number of downloads, said to be around 37 million.

“Users of the app are particularly religious people and have [a] higher chance to be also pro-regime and within [the] body of the army,” he wrote. “One important but seemingly ignored fact about this app is that it requests location access to operate.”

The availability of user location data and other app telemetry, he suggested, “can be (ab)used in many different and interesting ways!”

The app’s maker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lukasz Olejnik, independent consultant, author, and visiting senior research fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, says that he predicted this very scenario in his 2024 book Propaganda.

He characterized the message campaign not as a cyberattack but as a psychological operation intended to influence Iranian society and the country’s security forces.

Olejnik told The Register in an email that there’s very little app users can do beyond being skeptical about what gets displayed on their screens – advice that may be difficult to follow given the expectations for push notifications.

“Push…

Source