Iranian Cyber Threat Actor Targets Iraqi Government Officials in AI-Powered Campaign

(Kevin Poireault – Infosecurity Magazine) An Iran-nexus cyber threat actor has been targeting government officials in Iraq by impersonating Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the use of AI tools. Government–related infrastructure in Iraq was compromised and used to host malicious payloads distributed as part of this campaign. The campaign was detected in January 2026 by Zscaler ThreatLabz, which track the threat actor as Dust Specter and have attributed it to Iran “with medium to high confidence.”. ThreatLabz discovered the use of previously undocumented malware in this campaign, including Split Drop, TwinTask, TwinTalk and GhostForm. The researchers also observed several fingerprints in the codebase indicating that Dust Specter leveraged generative AI for malware development. – Iranian Cyber Threat Actor Targets Iraqi Government Officials – Infosecurity Magazine