US military personnel and contractors were reportedly targeted in a suspected phone-tracking campaign during the war with Iran, with attackers allegedly exploiting mobile roaming systems and commercial advertising technology to locate American personnel across the Middle East, The Caspian Post reports, citing The Financial Times.

According to telecoms data reviewed by the newspaper and sources familiar with the matter, mobile networks across the Middle East were subjected to repeated cyberattacks before and during the conflict, which began with the US-Israeli assault on Iran in late February and was followed by Iranian missile and drone strikes against US forces in the region.

The data, provided by the Mobile Surveillance Monitor research project, showed a sharp increase in SS7 location requests-signalling messages that exploit longstanding vulnerabilities in global mobile networks to estimate a phone's location. Cybersecurity experts who examined the data said the pattern indicated a coordinated effort to track specific devices.

Officials in Gulf states reportedly suspected Iran or allied groups of using roaming agreements with regional telecommunications operators to identify US personnel. Separately, a US official told the Financial Times that Iran-linked actors had also exploited commercially available advertising databases to track mobile phones in Iraq's Kurdistan region.

"Iran absolutely has capabilities to get real-time, immediate, and continuous location information," said Gary Miller, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab. "It would surprise me very much if Iran were not using SS7, or mobile network access in the region, to track US users."

US Central Command told Congress in April that it had "received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theatre," while emphasizing that it had implemented "unprecedented force-protection measures" to safeguard its personnel. A US official also said that "any claim suggesting data tracking played a significant role in attacks ... is a departure from the facts."

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said the reported operation would mark the first known case of US adversaries using commercial location data to target American personnel during wartime.

"For years I've warned both Democratic and Republican administrations about the national security threat posed by foreign adversaries tracking the phones of US personnel," Wyden said.

Republican Congressman Pat Harrigan, who has proposed legislation to restrict the sale of government employees' digital location data, warned that "the capability and the threat ... exists. If it continues to be exploited, and it's exploited properly, it could be catastrophic."

A 2024 review by the Pentagon's Inspector General previously found that the US military had not fully addressed vulnerabilities linked to commercially issued smartphones used by service members.