Iran denies that US ICT attacks are successful

Iran’s ICT Minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi claims that the United States tries very hard to carry out successful internet and computer attacks on his country, but does not succeed.

Azari Jahromi responds on Twitter to media reports last weekend that the US attacked Iran’s IT systems to disable Iranian missile launchers. According to The Washington Post, Iran would have suffered damage that is difficult to repair.

However, the Iranian ICT minister claims that the attacks were not successful, and neither were previous attacks. He writes of being asked by media about the ‘alleged cyber attack on Iran’: “We have been confronted for a long time with cyber terrorism such as Stuxnet, and unilateral sanctions. Last year we defused 33 million attacks.”

According to Azari Jahromi, no successful actions have taken place, “although they are making a lot of effort.” He does not specifically comment on the reports of attacks on missile systems that allegedly took place.

In the Stuxnet attack to which the minister refers in 2010, Iranian centrifuges for enriching uranium were attacked via advanced malware. That attack is blamed on the US and Israel. It is unclear how successful those attacks were, but it is believed that production at the facilities was severely hampered and was temporarily halted several times.