Iran’s telecommunications minister announced on Sunday that the country has defused a second cyber attack in less than a week, The Associated Press reports.
This attack was “aimed at spying on government intelligence”, said the minister, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi.
The alleged attack was “identified and defused by a cybersecurity shield,” he wrote on Twitter, adding that the “spying servers were identified and the hackers were also tracked.” He did not elaborate.
Last Wednesday, Jahromi said that the country had defused a “massive cyberattack” on unspecified “electronic infrastructure" but provided no specifics on the purported 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.