TEHRAN - Online messaging services based in Iran were hit by attacks that mostly originated from the United States and Europe, according to an Iranian deputy telecoms minister who says the attacks were the largest of their kind since the country imposed bans on U.S.-based messaging services in late September.
Amir Muhammadzadeh said that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Iranian messaging services had been launched from 4,399 IP addresses in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and some other countries.
Muhammadzadeh said some 30% of the IP addresses used for the attacks were in the U.S. and 26% were from Germany, adding that the attacks started at 22:00 PM local time on Sunday and lasted for six hours.
“This was not the largest attack on us in the past month but it was significant because messengers were the target,” he was quoted as saying by the Fars news agency.
The official said that Eita, the second most popular social media platform in Iran, was the main target of the DDoS attacks launched from the U.S. and Europe, adding that attackers had created more than 140 terabytes of traffic with a maximum rate of 30 gigabits per second.
Iran-based online messengers have seen their active users increase exponentially since September when authorities restricted access to U.S.-based social media platforms WhatsApp and Instagram over their role in fomenting street riots in the country.
Figures by Iran’s telecoms ministry released in early December showed the number of active daily users of Iranian social media applications had reached over 10 million for at least two popular platforms.