Iran's Minister of Communications Criticizes Maher Center for Lack of 'Special' Warning Regarding Recent Cyber Attack

Following a cyber attack on several data centers in Iran despite warnings issued 10 days prior, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology stated that the Maher Center should have issued a 'special' warning about the likelihood of such an event, and that 'this matter will be addressed'. Meanwhile, the Computer Emergency Response Management Center, known as Maher, announced that the services of major companies and data centers, including Afranet, Asia Tech, Shatel, Pars Online, and Respina, 'have fully returned to normal'. Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, said in an interview with Iranian television on Saturday, April 18, that 'the Maher Center had given warnings regarding these attacks and a few days prior, but they were not in a special format, and this issue will also be pursued by the Ministry of Communications'. The Iranian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology also announced on Saturday that the American company Cisco had warned about vulnerabilities in the router switches that were attacked 10 days earlier. According to this announcement, 'many private companies keep their network settings in a frozen state during holidays, and the lack of clear communication from the Maher Center and failure to warn these companies to update their network settings led to vulnerabilities in their networks'. On Friday night, following the cyber attacks, several Iranian websites went offline. According to statistics announced by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, 35,000 router switches in Iran were attacked, with 'the most vulnerabilities occurring in Respina, Iziran, and Shatel'. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of Iran also stated regarding the origin of these attacks that 'since the attack used the flag of the United States and a slogan regarding non-interference in the elections of that country, and also the timing of the attack suggests that the origin was not from the Middle East'. Meanwhile, the Fars News Agency quoted the US-CERT, the Computer Emergency Readiness Team in the US Department of Homeland Security, stating that these attacks are attributed to the Russian government, and additionally, the cybersecurity company Symantec holds the Dragonfly hacking group responsible for these attacks. In recent years, several Iranian administrative websites have been targeted by cyber attacks. For instance, the Iranian Statistics Center was temporarily taken offline on June 4, 2016, and subsequently, the website of the Iranian Registration Organization and several official websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including the websites of Iranian embassies in Argentina, Ukraine, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan, were hacked. At that time, the Cyber Police claimed that these actions were carried out by 'three companies centered in Saudi Arabia', although later the Cyber Crime Investigation Center of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced that hackers of some government websites had been arrested. In February of last year, 'hackers' targeted several news websites in Iran, including the Law, Arman, and Setareh Sobh newspapers, and later Iranian Ministry of Communications officials claimed that the origin of these attacks was the United States and the United Kingdom. Iran itself has been recognized since 2012 for its involvement in the hacking of several American banks, hacking a small dam near New York, and attempts to attack the accounts of officials in Barack Obama's administration. Recently, a report published by the Carnegie Endowment in the US indicates that security agencies in Iran, like other security agencies worldwide, have increasingly become skilled in cyber espionage and destructive attacks. These actions range from targeting opponents of the Iranian government inside and outside the country, civil institutions in Iran, to government, defense, commercial, and diplomatic organizations in the US, Israel, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. This report, which focused on the destructive actions of the Iranian government in cyberspace, notes that the Iranian government conducts its offensive operations in cyberspace under the guise of misleading public accounts to showcase its capabilities while shirking responsibility for such actions. In April of this year, 10 Iranian individuals and entities were sanctioned by the United States for hacking hundreds of American and international universities. Iran was also accused last October of being involved in cyber attacks on the accounts of some British parliament members.