TEHRAN ( WNAM MONITORING): Iran’s Minister of Information and Communications Technology says the country has successfully repelled one of the most extensive cyberattacks ever launched against its communications infrastructure.
Minister of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Sattar Hashemi said that the country came under a massive cyberattack targeting its communications infrastructure late last week, describing it as one of the largest and most widespread in recent years, Press TV reported.
“On Sunday afternoon, the country witnessed one of the biggest and most extensive cyberattacks against its communications infrastructure. The attacks were launched from more than 120,000 different sources across the world and specifically targeted one of the country’s telecommunications service providers,” he said.
Hashemi said the attack was fully repelled due to preventive measures already in place. “With the arrangements that had been made, the attack was completely thwarted and neutralized,” he stressed.
The minister noted that Iran manages cyber threats on two fronts from both outside and inside the country.
“At the external level, part of the attacks is controlled using the capacity of international internet service providers and equipment installed outside the country. However, a large portion of these attacks passes through that layer and is managed domestically, relying on the capabilities of locally produced products and the capacity of the Telecommunications Infrastructure Company,” Hashemi added.
The minister emphasized that the scale and intensity of the latest assault could have caused serious disruption.
“This attack, in terms of its scope and severity, is among the most significant cyberattacks in recent times and could have created major challenges for the country.
“But thanks to vigilance, proper planning, and the round-the-clock efforts of communications experts, it was contained without leading to a crisis,” Hashemi stressed.
Addressing recent reports of slower internet speeds, the minister said the cyberattacks had temporarily affected bandwidth availability.
“The coincidence of these large-scale cyberattacks led to part of the country’s bandwidth being occupied, which can temporarily cause a drop in speed or disruptions in service quality,” he said.
However, “improving the quality of communications services through serious and fundamental infrastructure projects remains firmly on the agenda of the Ministry of Communications”, he added.
On Monday, Behzad Akbari, head of the Telecommunications Infrastructure Company, also said that Iran’s network had confronted an unprecedented distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
“Last night, the infrastructure network identified and countered the largest DDoS attack in recent years in terms of packets per second, targeting one of the country’s operators,” he said in a post on social media.
He added that “the attack exceeded 720 million packets per second, of which 502 million packets per second were mitigated by the infrastructure company’s own systems, with the remainder countered outside the country.”
