Iran Foils Large-Scale Cyberattack Targeting Internet

Iran’s Telecommunications Ministry said Sunday it repelled a major cyberattack on Saturday that partially shut down the country’s internet services for an hour. Deputy Minister Hamid Fattahi tweeted that “mercenary hackers” launched “the most extensive attack experienced in Iran’s history” against the country’s internet infrastructure. Fattahi said the intruders hit “millions of targets” in order to disrupt Iran’s internet network. “The strike has been repulsed and [hackers] are going to the wall,” he said.

A Telecommunications Ministry official said Saturday that the distributed denial-of-service attack “disrupted the internet services of some mobile and fixed operators for an hour” at 11:44 (0814 GMT). A DDoS attack involves overwhelming a target’s servers by making a massive number of junk requests.

DDoS attackers normally use hijacked or virus-infected computers to target websites. During such attacks, websites become unreachable after an unusually large number of requests for information are sent to them, causing the servers that host them to fail.

Twitter sources close to the communications ministry said the spoofed IP addresses from which the “highly distributed attacks” had been launched were from East Asia and North America.
“Connections have returned to normal following the intervention of Dejfa shield,” Sajad Bonabi said, referring to Iran’s digital fortress against cyberattacks.

He did not elaborate on the source of the attack.

Bonabi is a board member at the ministry’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Company, the sole provider of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure.

Internet monitor NetBlocks confirmed Saturday’s outage and said it was “consistent with a targeted disruption and no technical faults are evident at the present time”.

Iran said in December it had thwarted a “highly organized cyberattack” targeting its e-government infrastructure.

Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi described the attack as “really massive” and “state-sponsored”.

In late September, the country’s energy sector was put “on full alert” to the threat of “physical and cyber” attacks a few days after Iran denied media reports its oil installations had been disrupted by a cyberattack.

DDoS attacks also in September targeted Iranian websites that were involved in cryptocurrency trade. Authorities said those attacks were 20 times more powerful than similar attacks in other countries. - Iran Daily