Iran Warns of State-Sponsored Cyber Attacks

Local Editor

Iranian authorities said Friday that their computer systems are being targeted extensively, and although assaults are waged at the Iranian computer infrastructure are nothing new, the coinciding attacks suggest a cyber-war could indeed be heating up between American entities and the United States’ foreign adversaries. Mehdi Akhavan Behabadi, secretary of the High Council of Cyberspace, told the Iranian Labour News Agency that his country is cracking down on access to content on the Web as investigators try to determine the perpetrators behind the attacks this week that are affecting several sectors of the Iranian e-grid. “Yesterday we had a heavy attack against the country's infrastructure and communications companies which has forced us to limit the Internet," Behabadi told Reuters news agency in an article published Wednesday. "Presently we have constant cyber-attacks in the country. Yesterday an attack with a traffic of several gigabytes hit the Internet infrastructure, which caused an unwanted slowness in the country's Internet.” Iranian official suspect the assault on their systems are state-sponsored as well, while previously, engineers and computer experts have linked at least two types of viruses acting maliciously on Iran’s computer to the United States: the Stuxnet worm and the Flame virus. This time around, Behabadi once again suggests that the assault is more than just a maneuver from a few well-coordinated computer hackers. "All of these attacks have been organized. And they have in mind the country's nuclear, oil, and information networks,” he adds to Reuters. Although the US had not admitted responsibility in either Flame or Stuxnet, the malware has long been assumed to have been developed in cooperation with American engineers. Experts at Russia’s Kaspersy Labs reported last month that they identified three new, similar viruses that they believe are related to the others sent to infect Iran, saying the malware’s coding “fits the profile of military and/or intelligence operations."