A petition on Change.org seeks the return of three allegedly stolen domains: Amadnews.com, Amadnews.net, and Amadnews.org.
It’s a political petition against Iran’s government, and accuses former administrators of these domains of hijacking them.
The petition is written in Arabic, English and French, and is titled with a “Give our Domains back” headline:
Amadnews.com has been hijacked allegedly.
To all the libertarians around the world ;
The corrupt regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been launching numerous cyber attacks to free media in order to prevent a proper information sharing and awareness inceasing. Since @AmadNewsNetwork is not sponsored by any foreign government, or any domestic institution or foundations, and can not provide adequate cyber support, it has repeatedly been subjected to numerous attacks by the regime’s cyber agents. Therefore, the domain owns by AmadNewsNetwork, including Amadnews.Net, Amadnews.Org, Amadnews.com has been stolen and hacked and our admins do not have access to these domains any more.
The news of these atacks have been widely reported by the regime’s media.
Stealing these domains has been conducted by presenting the foreign companies with a fake French passport attributed to Roohollah Zam, the founder of AmadNewsNetwork. The copy of this fake passport has been presented to legitimate international authorities by Roohollah Zam for further investigations.
At this time, we need your help. You can testify by signing this petition and help us to file an international lawsuit against the Islamic Republic and its Cyber Corps.
Please send this petition to your friends and ask them to sign it.
If you do not support us by signing this petition, the independent Iranian Media be shut down with the continued conspiracy of the regime.
Viva Freedom
Viva Democracy
More than 9,235 people have signed the petition. While Amadnews.com points to a hosted web site, all content has been deleted. The .net is hosted on a suspended cPanel account, and the .org is in expiry at GoDaddy.
In 2017, archived content from the web site indicates that Amadnews may have provoked the powers that be in Iran with its articles.
If true it’s very concerning how the domains were stolen with a forged passport.
Kind of sucks how photo ID seems to be the status quo for identity verification at companies.
Anyone else got any other information?