Pierluigi Paganini December 15, 2019

Iran telecommunications minister announced that for the second time in a week Iran has foiled a cyber attack against its infrastructure.

Iran has foiled a new cyber-attack, the country’s telecommunications minister Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi says.

A few days ago, the Iranian telecommunications minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, announced that the Islamic Republic had recently thwarted a “highly organized cyber attack” targeting its government infrastructure.

The news was reported by both the ISNA and Mehr news agencies, the Iranian minister defined the attack as “really massive” and attributed it to a nation-state actor.

Now Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi confirmed that the attack had targeted Iranian electronic government systems again.

The Iranian minister confirmed that the attack was neutralized by the national cyber shield, so-called Dejfa, according to Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi the attack was launched by the China-linked APT27 group seeking for gathering intelligence its country.

The APT27 cyber espionage group (aka Emissary Panda, TG-3390, Bronze Union, and Lucky Mouse) has been active since 2010, it targeted organizations worldwide, including U.S. defense contractors, financial services firms, and a national data center in Central Asia.

In April, the Chinese APT group Emissary Panda targeted government organizations in two different countries in the Middle East.

The group was involved in cyber espionage campaigns aimed at new generation weapons and in surveillance activities on dissidents and other civilian groups. 

The cyber espionage group leverage both readily available tools and custom malware in their operations, many tools are available for years, but in recent attacks, their code was updated

The minister did not reveal details of the attack and the targets inside the government infrastructure hit by the hackers.

“Last Wednesday, Mr Jahromi told Iran’s official Irna news agency that a “massive” cyber-attack had targeted Iran’s electronic infrastructure.” reported the BBC.

“A day earlier, the minister had dismissed reports that millions of Iranian bank accounts had been hacked.”

At the end of September, Iran ‘s oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, ordered companies operating in the energy sector to be on ‘full alert’ to the threat of “physical and cyber” attacks.

In early October, Iran announced it was fearing retaliation of Western countries that are accusing it to carry out physical and cyber attacks against their infrastructure and countries in the Middle East.

At the time, Iran’s oil ministry said that the Government of Washington has launched a full-scale economic war” against the Islamic Republic in retaliation for the shooting down of a US drone as well as attacks on oil tankers that the US has blamed Iran.

Gholamreza Jalali, Iran’s Passive Defense Organization chief, announced that that “America has started its cyber war against Iran, without providing more details.

The news was reported by the ISNA news website on October 1, Jalali also added that Iran “decisively will resort to cyber defense.”

The US is going to set to impose additional sanctions on Iran to prevent its government from going on with his nuclear weapon program, US President Trump has described them as “major”.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Iran, hacking)

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