![]() A branch of the Iranian military, the IRGC is behind the country’s covert military activities in the region and beyond, including cyberattacks.Ĭyber attacks allow for plausible deniability Iran, meanwhile, has been unnerved by Israel’s targeted killing of Iranian nuclear scientists and, more recently, senior members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Israel is concerned about Iranian acceleration of its uranium enrichment program and growing military entrenchment in Syria. The actions have been fueled by heightened geopolitical tensions between Israel and Iran. For both sides, the apparent aim of the civilian sector operations has been to present their adversary as weak and vulnerable, and to sap national morale. Iran has mostly breached the databases of Israeli companies and public organizations. While Israel has continued to target Natanz, it has broadened its actions, hitting Iranian public services, such as nationwide petrol stations. Iran and Israel began mounting a series of seemingly tit-for-tat cyber attacks on each other’s civilian sectors. ![]() Speaking after the retaliatory Shahid Rahjee operation, the former head of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yadlin said the attack appeared to be a “clear Israeli message to Iran – don’t dare to touch civilian systems…You, the Iranians, are more vulnerable than we are.” Israel took the view that a red line had been crossed. With Iran’s attack on Israel’s water facilities in April 2020, the previously shadowy cyber war sprang into the open, with civilian infrastructure targeted for the first time. Tehran has long called for Israel’s destruction, its atomic energy program regarded by Israel as an existential threat. The first shots are widely believed to have been fired by Israel over a decade ago in a joint operation with the US that damaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. The attacks marked an escalation in a long-running cyber conflict between the regional adversaries and demonstrate how cyberspace is likely to be used to sustain low-level conflict between nation states in the future. Satellite images showed container ships stranded at sea and queues of vehicles stretching for miles outside the port. He said the outcome could have been “disastrous.” Israel quickly retaliated, crashing computer systems in the Iranian port of Shahid Rahjee, temporarily crippling the facility. Yigal Unna, then head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate (NCD), responsible for defending the country’s cyberspace, described the hacking incident as synchronized and organized. If the operation had not been detected, water supplies would have been severely disrupted and chemicals, including chlorine, raised to dangerously high levels. They are believed to have hacked into pump-operating software after routing through American and European servers to try to conceal their identity. At the height of the pandemic just over two years ago, Iranian hackers struck several Israeli water facilities, in an unprecedented cyber attack on the country’s civilian infrastructure.
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