When protests emerged in Tehran against the current regime, Iran installed thousands of cameras across streets to track people and stop protests. However, these cameras became their biggest weakness as Israel reportedly used them to track down Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and kill him.
According to an AP report, traffic cameras in Tehran were hacked and the data was transferred to servers in Israel for years. At least one camera was positioned at an angle that allowed tracking of people's daily movements, such as where they parked their cars near Iran's leadership compound.
Experts say advances in AI have allowed militaries to overcome a critical hurdle in weaponising hacked footage: sifting through huge amounts of video to identify people, vehicles, and other targets. With a simple keyword search, AI can scan feeds and return results almost immediately.
Iran's camera systems were compromised multiple times in the past, including in 2021 and 2022 when Iranian exile groups released footage exposing abuses inside Tehran's infamous Evin prison and leaked gigabytes of surveillance footage and internal data on Telegram.
The risks became stark during a 12-day war in 2025, when Israel reportedly used Tehran's camera network to track and strike a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, an attack that injured President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Iran's reliance on outdated hardware and software due to sanctions has made its infrastructure more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Analysts estimate there are more than one billion security cameras installed worldwide, with hundreds of millions more added each year.
