Iran Claims It Foiled Cyberattack On Central Bank
Iran has foiled a cyberattack on its central bank, and government -controlled apps, the country's telecommunications infrastructure company said on Friday.
Iran has foiled a cyberattack on its central bank, and government -controlled apps, the country's telecommunications infrastructure company said on Friday.
Anonymous and other global hacking groups threatened in October to launch cyberattacks on Iranian institutions and officials in support of anti-government protests and to bypass internet censorship there.
Several hackings did take place and a throve of government secrets have been put online by hactivist groups since October. The most notable were secret briefing files stolen from Fars news agency that reveled texts of secret briefings for senior officials.
Amir Mohammadzadeh Lajevardi, head of the Infrastructure Communications Company, said the central bank was targeted by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Thursday night, the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying.
DDoS attacks attempt to cripple servers by overwhelming them with internet traffic.
"These days, the largest volume of foreign attacks is against banks and financial institutions, internet providers and communications infrastructures, which have been repelled," Lajevardi said. IRNA gave no further details.
The central bank said in September that a cyberattack briefly took its website offline.
Internet access has been severely limited in Iran since widespread protests erupted over the death in mid-September of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, while in the custody of the morality police over enforcement of mandatory dress code laws.
At the time the outer walls of the UK embassy in Tehran were defaced by anti-British slogans. This week, hardliner elements did the same to the French embassy after the satirical Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo published a special issue with caricatures of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The issue of downgrading Tehran's ties with London had also been discussed at the Iranian parliament in 2009 and 2010. In 2010 ultraconservative lawmakers demanded severing ties with London altogether. The motion was sent to the Foreign Relations and National Security Committee of the Majles, but did not go any further.
Esmail Kowsari, an IRGC general who is a member of the parliament (Majles), demanded the implementation of the law against the UK and also called on the government to reconsider its ties with Germany and France.
In 2011, the move was motivated by a set of UK sanctions against Iran and in late 2022 Iranian hardliners began a series of acts of vandalism against the British embassy in Tehran as the United Kingdom, Germany and France took the lead in escalating international actions against Iran's human rights violation and drone deliveries to Russia, as well as passing a resolution at the United Nations to set up a fact-finding committee about Tehran's violations of human rights.
Kowsari told Etemad Online in December that the three European states have sinister ideas about the Iranian nation and their anti-Iranian moves have proven this. Kowsari also said in an interview with the IRGC-linked Fars News Agency: "We wish to expand our diplomatic relations, but we do not want this relation at any price."
Thursday morning in Tehran, vigilante groups vandalized parts of the French embassy in Tehran in revenge for French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo publishing a special issue on Wednesday with cartoons about Khamenei under the title: "Let's take back the mullahs to where they come from."
The Iranian foreign minister called the cartoons "rude and unethical" and summoned the French ambassador to the Foreign Ministry to hand him a note of protest mindless of the fact that unlike the Islamic Republic, the French government does not intervene in the affairs of independent press. Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian threatened to give a firm and effective response to the satirical weekly. Meanwhile, Iran shut down the French "Iranian Studies Center" in Tehran, a prestigious research center whose works are respected by Iranian and French scholars.
The 2011 legislation was followed by an arson attack on the British embassy in Tehran by vigilante groups who were characterized by the government-owned press as "students," but independent sources questioned the characterization. Iran's -then- deputy foreign ministers Hassan Ghashghavi and Ali Ahani went to the Majles to convince the lawmakers that cutting ties with London was not in the country's interest. The Majles subsequently added a clause to the legislation which said that ties with the UK could be normalized if the UK changed its policies toward Iran.
In 2017 Ahmadinejad called the legislation and the attack on the British embassy a move that provided pretexts to the United Kingdom to take action against Iran. He also accused the Iranian state television of broadcasting live the attack on the British embassy.
Hardliner members of the parliament prevented -then- UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw from taking part in Hassan Rouhani's inauguration ceremony in 2013. But eventually, three years later the two countries’ embassies were reopened after a relatively long closure.
A senior ayatollah separately agreed with Hashemi that clerics have lost influence and the government has been doing a lousy job both in foreign policy and in domestic affairs.
Hashemi expressed regret in an interview with Jomhuouri Eslami newspaper, which was also carried by many other Iranian news outlets, that one of the country's current problems is that there are no charismatic leaders.
Hashemi, a former chairman of the Tehran City Council, said in the interview that people’s financial situation is "more than critical" as inflation and unemployment have reached an explosive level. He added that in such a situation tackling economic problems should have been the government's first priority.
Hashemi reminded that his father's "reconstruction government" (1989-1997) recognized poverty as Iran's biggest enemy and prioritized economic progress over the ideological campaigns against the United States and Israel and attached high significance to people's food, housing, health and education.
He further pointed out that with the concentration of power in the hands of Iran’s conservatives and the elimination of ‘moderates’ and ‘reformists’ from the political scene in the 2020 parliamentary election and 2021 presidential election, Iran is entangled in political deadlock. Conservatives control not only the parliament and the cabinet, but also the state media, the armed forces, the Guardian Council, and all other political institutions.
"In such a monopolized situation, the conservatives cannot even blame others for the problems they have created for the country.” They can no longer blame others and “ there is no way out of the situation as no alternative approach has been left," Hashemi said, adding that "In such a situation neither progress is possible, nor a U-turn is acceptable for the 'revolutionaries' in Iran."
Hashemi also pointed out that an unprecedented consensus has been formed in the international community against the Islamic Republic because of mistakes by the ultraconservative government in foreign policy. When foreigners talk about intervention in Iran, we see no serious opposition to that in Western public opinion. He said that no UN resolution has been ever issued about Iraq, Libya and Syria like the resolution that called for a fact-finding committee to probe into the violation of human rights in the Islamic Republic.
The UN Human Rights Council voted November 24 to launch an independent investigation into Iran's deadly repression of protests, that has killed around 500 civilians.
He quoted Iranian academics as saying that the Islamic Republic is suffering from a bipolar political situation and a state of near collapse in which neither politicians nor clerics have any influence or control over the society.
At the same time, Ayatollah Hossein Mousavi Tabrizi, a former Attorney General, said Wednesday that top clerics have lost their status as a point of reference for the Iranian society. Tabrizi also harshly criticized the government's economic and foreign policies.
He said: "I wish at least there were a group of economists in the government who did nothing other than sort out the economic issues, but it is not clear who in Iran is responsible for solving the country's economic problems."
Speaking on foreign policy, Tabrizi talked about an issue for which solely Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is responsible. He said: "Trusting the Russians brings losses to us. Russians betray Iran and take advantage of us. They pretend to be Iran's friend, but they keep blackmailing Tehran." Tabrizi pointed out: "We need to correct our foreign policy, otherwise, the Russians will plunder our resources and at the end serve other countries' interests."
