On Saturday last week, Iran’s Telecom Sector witnessed a Distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) which could have easily disrupted 25% of Internet services operating in the region. But the good news is that the cyber teams acted upon the cyber threat on an immediate note which eventually averted a digital massacre from taking place in Iran.
Sajjad Bonabi, the head of Iran’s Telecom Sector has endorsed the news and said that the attack impacted operations of several ISPs and two renowned telecom companies. Although no major incidents were reported, most web users reported that they were experiencing connection errors.
Bonabi tweeted yesterday that the effects of DDoS attack were neutralized through DEJFA, the IT Fortress of Iran.
Technically DEJFA happens to be a Digital Fortress that aims to protect the populace of Iran from cyber-attacks taking place on Critical Infrastructure, thus helping them sustain digital services, during the digital crisis. It was launched in August 2019 to protect the country’s Industrial Infrastructure against espionage and sabotage related cyber-attacks.
NetBlocks which monitors the governance of the internet has confirmed that disruption of Iran’s internet was planned by hackers from a state-funded group on Feb 8th of this year. The non-governmental organizations which aim for internet freedom have ascertained that the objective behind launching a DDoS attack was to drop the internet connectivity of Iran to 75% – which couldn’t happen on a practical note.
In the past decade or some, most of the developed nations operating in the east and west have grown strong on a digital note, when it comes to sophistication and technology usage. Most powerful leaders of the world feel that the use of cyber warfare will be immense if at all a Third World War takes place as almost all countries have/are developing cyber weapons to be used against their adversaries if/when a need arises.
Details of the nation behind the attack are being kept under wraps by the Iranian government.
