In the past few days many Iranian websites (mostly government organizations) got attacked by hackers on a large scale. Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace has announced that there is no threat to the citizen’s information on the government website.
The websites of The Statistical Centre of Iran, The State Organization for Registration of Deeds & Properties, the Post Company, Ahvaz’s University of Shahid Chamran were attacked in the past days by unknown groups of hackers. The signature of the hackers on these websites were “Mafia Hacking Team” and “Da3s Hacker” which because of the name resemblance had led many to think the hackers were associated with Daesh (ISIS). Some of the local news agencies later speculated that the “Da3s Hacker” group are associated with Saudi Arabia since the Twitter handle of the group follows a couple of Saudi accounts.
It is yet not known where the hackers are originally from as the Secretary of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace announced that the hackers used fake names for propaganda. The Secretary of this council stated that these hacks are no surprise and happen everywhere around the world, as the SWIFT network was also attacked recently. “As the result of the recent hacking of government websites, we assure that there are no problems whatsoever regarding the citizen’s information,” insured Abolhassan Firouzabadi, Secretary of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace.
Facenama one the most visited websites in Iran with a ranking of 17 on Alexa, got attacked by a group of hackers over a year ago, exposing the database of its 2 million users. This incident happened right after they transferred their servers from Canada to Iran.
Just a day after the Iranian websites went under the cyberattack, Tasnim reported that two Saudi government websites were hacked by a group that has not yet unveiled its identity. It’s rumored that these Saudi websites were hacked as a response from Iranian hackers. This is not the first time that the two countries have been targeting each other’s cyberspace. Last year the website of Iranian Military of Defense was hacked by a Saudi hacker.
General Jalili, head of the Passive Defense Organization of Iran had announced that the Saudis are trying to make large scale cyberattacks on Iran. The general had stated that one of the country’s focuses in the current Persian year is blocking the cyber threats.
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