American and British Intelligence agencies revealed that Russian hackers are using Iranian cyber spy groups as their cloaks to target several countries including Britain.

According to Sky News, these intelligence agencies accused the Russian-based group known as Turla of piggybacking on an Iranian hacker group to target other countries while putting the blame on the Iranian group.

Based on the report, the Russian hackers targeted governments and organizations in over 35 countries, mostly in the Middle East.

According to Britain’s National Cyber Security Center, these hackers were able to scan and infiltrate the capabilities and tools of Iranian hacker groups OilRig and APT34 and use them to launch their attacks.

Therefore, the victims of these attacks pointed their fingers at Iran, even though Turla was behind these attacks.

Paul Chichester, director of operations for the NCSC, the protective arm of the intelligence agency GCHQ said: “We want to send a clear message that even when cyber-actors seek to mask their identity, our capabilities are a match for them and we can identify them."

According to Sky News, one of these targets was a university in Britain that was not named.

Sky News described the revelation as “hacking of Iranian hackers by Russians,” and Chichester said that in terms of sophistication and delicacy, it was unique.

Britain’s National Cyber Security Center and the NSA started their investigations in late 2017.

Turla is usually involved in gathering information through targeting governmental, military, energy, technology, and commercial institutions.

According to Chichester, it is not clear whether the Iranians were aware of Turla’s infiltration or not.