TEHRAN -- One of Iran’s major steel companies said on Monday it foiled a cyberattack which appeared to be one the biggest such assaults on the country’s strategic industrial sector in recent memory.
The Khuzestan Steel Company said experts had determined the plant had to stop work until further notice “due to technical problems” following “cyberattacks”.
The company’s CEO, Amin Ebrahimi, said that Khuzestan Steel managed to thwart the cyberattack and prevent structural damage to production lines that would impact supply chains and customers.
“Fortunately with time and awareness, the attack was unsuccessful,” the Mehr news agency quoted Ebrahimi as saying, adding that he expected everything to return to “normal” by the end of Monday.
A local news channel, Jamaran, reported that the attack failed because the factory happened to be non-operational at the time due to an electricity outage.
Last year, a cyberattack on Iran’s fuel distribution targeted gas stations across the country.
Officials have previously pointed the finger at the United States and the occupying regime of Israel.
Iran disconnected much of its government infrastructure from the internet after the Stuxnet computer virus — widely believed to be a joint U.S.-Israeli creation — disrupted some of its centrifuges in the country’s nuclear sites in the late 2000s.
Khuzestan Steel Company, based in Ahvaz in the oil-rich southwestern Khuzestan province, has a monopoly on steel production in Iran along with two other major state-owned firms.
Founded before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the company for decades afterward had some production lines supplied by German, Italian and Japanese companies. Service has been continuous except during catastrophic Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his army across the border.
However, draconian sanctions on Iran have forced the company to reduce its dependence on foreign parts.
The government considers steel a crucial sector. Iran is the leading producer of steel in the Middle East and among the top 10 in the world, according to the World Steel Association. Its iron ore mines provide raw materials for domestic production and are exported to dozens of countries, including Italy, China and the United Arab Emirates.