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Asharq Al-Awsat
Asharq Al-Awsat
World
Asharq Al-Awsat

Iran Acknowledges Cyberattacks on Government Departments

FILE PHOTO: A man types on a computer keyboard in this illustration picture taken February 28, 2013. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

Iran's cybersecurity authority acknowledged on Thursday cyberattacks on two governmental departments this week.

The cyberattacks occurred Tuesday and Wednesday and were under investigation, the state-owned IRAN daily newspaper said.

While the report did not say which government departments were targeted, it called the attacks “important” and said some other departments temporarily took down their online services as a precaution against further attacks.

According to The Associated Press, the brief report did not blame any group or country for the attacks.

Iran occasionally says it has thwarted cyberattacks on its infrastructure, although it has disconnected much of its infrastructure from the internet after the Stuxnet computer virus, widely believed to be a joint US-Israeli creation, disrupted thousands of Iranian centrifuges in the country’s nuclear sites in the late 2000s.

In December, Iran said it halted a massive cyberattack on unspecified “electronic infrastructure” but provided no specifics on the purported attack.

Last year, Washington officials said that US military cyber forces launched a strike against Iranian military computer systems, as President Donald Trump backed away from plans for a more conventional military strike in response to Iran’s downing of a US surveillance drone in the Arabian Gulf.

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