Iran's telecommunications minister said on Wednesday that the country had defused a “massive cyberattack” on unspecified “electronic infrastructure" but provided no specifics on the purported attack.
The minister, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, said, according to The Associated Press, the “security attack was very large” and that authorities were investigating its exact dimensions.
He said he cannot reveal any further details beyond saying that the “attack has been identified and defused.”
It was not clear if the reported attack caused any damage or disruptions to Iran's computer and internet systems, and whether it was the latest chapter in the US and Iran’s ongoing cyber operations targeting the other.
“I cannot give details but yes, we were targeted by a very organized and governmental cyber attack," the minister was quoted as having said. “We are looking into the attack's different dimensions and will release a report on it. It was a massive attack.”
This past summer it was reported that the US had launched a secret cyber attack against Iran. The attack reportedly wiped out a critical database used by Iran’s paramilitary arm to plot attacks against oil tankers and degraded Tehran’s ability to covertly target shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf.
This is not the first time Iran says it has defused a cyberattack, though it has disconnected much of its infrastructure from the internet after the Stuxnet computer virus which disrupted thousands of Iranian centrifuges in its nuclear sites in the late 2000s.
Stuxnet is widely believed to be an American and Israeli creation, though Israel did not admit to being behind it. A 2012 report said that then-US President Barack Obama ordered the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran as part of a wave of cyber sabotage and espionage against the Islamic Republic.