Newscaster

Newscaster is one of the earliest documented names for the Iranian threat cluster now widely known as Charming Kitten. The designation was introduced by iSight Partners (now part of Mandiant) in 2014 to describe an Iranian social media persona operation that used fabricated journalist and news outlet identities to target US military, defense contractors, and government officials for espionage purposes. The Newscaster operation demonstrated Iran's early investment in long-term social engineering infrastructure, a capability that has remained a defining characteristic of the Charming Kitten cluster across more than a decade of operations.