Iranian officials said hackers infiltrated and damaged a small number of computers in Bandar Abbas town’s Shahid Rajaei port.
Iranian officials said Sunday that hackers damaged a small number of computers in a failed cyber-attack on Bandar Abbas port, the country’s largest port in the Hormuz Strait.
Information on the purpose of the cyber-attack remain unclear.
Last week, at the time of the attack, local Ports and Maritime Organization (PMO) officials in the state of Hormozgan denied something had gone wrong.
Officials dismissed reports of a cyber-attack following port operation concerns shutdown Friday.
Central government officials eventually cleaned up on Sunday about the cyber-attack due to media pressure after an unrelated incident in the Hormuz Strait as well.
Over the weekend, an Iranian navy-support ship named Konarak was hit by friendly fire while setting targets in the sea for a military exercise. The incident resulted in 19 sailors died and 15 others were wounded. Comments quickly emerged that there may have been a position for the cyber-attack.
Tehran officials have been forced to issue a formal statement on the cyber-attack of Bandar Abbas to assuage the growing conspiracy theories concerning the unrelated tragedy of Konarak.
“A recent cyber attack failed to penetrate the PMO ‘s networks and could only infiltrate and harm a number of private operating systems in the port,” Mohammad Rastad, Iran’s Deputy Minister of Roads and Urban Development, said on Sunday, according to Ilna News and the Fars News Agency.
Rastad said the attack was coming from outside the country but did not provide any further information. The deputy minister did not indicate if it was a foreign government or a financially motivated cybercrime group that carried out the incident.
This is the second time that Iranian officials say that a foreign cyber-attack did not harm computer systems.
The US conducted cyber-attacks in June 2019 with the intention of sabotaging Iran’s rocket and missile systems after Iranian forces shot down a US drone. The government in Tehran denied that they succeeded, as reported in US newspapers.
