A serious cyber security incident has affected the infrastructure of telecomunications in Iran. Before th launching of Zafar, a satellite developed by the iran government, the telecomunications aroudn the country experimented a massive interruption, which affected to millions of users in mobile phones and Internet.
The errors in the telecomunication networks were attributed to a service denial (DdoS), which requires to infest the servers with fake traffic to overload them and generate the interruption of the systems, said the vice minister of Technologies of the information and Comunications of Iran, Hamid Fatahi. The attack happened a day before the laucn of the satellite, an incident that represented a serious problem for the communications’ infrastructure in Iran.
Momento del lanzamiento del satélite Zafar
FUENTE: TASNIM NEWS AGENCY
Multiple telecomunication companies were attacked during the incident, so the activity in these networks decreased around a 75%, said the specialists in cybersecurity. While most of the affected services were restrablished after an hour, ither networks kept being collapsed for mroe than 7 hours.
The ministery confirmed that the incident happened on saturday morning, adding that the attack were restrainted by the defense of cyebr security program inIran, known internally as Dejfa. This program were designed for handling this kind of incidents and other potential threats against the TI infrastructure of the country.
The iranian intelligence also mentions that the operators of the attacks falsified the original adresses, linking the incident to locations in North America and Asia. Besides, it also mentions that there has been shown that the participation of some governmental actor in the attack, although is one of the main hyphotesis.
According to the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS), to identify the real culprits of a cyber attack is a really hard task and requires a long investigation, that’s why the cyber attacks have become in a commonly used tool for governmental actors.
The Defja program was created 2 years ago due the multiple incidents of cybersecurity that have affected the critical systems of Iran. The last time that was activated it was around December 2019, when multiple servers of thr iranian government were under attack. In consequence, some tasks of the electric systems of Iran suffered interruptions in isolation.