TEHRAN -- Iran has foiled a cyberattack on its central bank, the country’s telecommunications infrastructure company said on Friday.
Hacking groups threatened in October to launch cyberattacks on Iranian institutions and officials in support of foreign-backed riots.
Amir Muhammadzadeh Lajevardi, head of the Infrastructure Communications Company, said the central bank was targeted by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Thursday night, the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying.
DDoS attacks attempt to cripple servers by overwhelming them with Internet traffic.
“These days, the largest volume of foreign attacks is against banks and financial institutions, Internet providers and communications infrastructures, which have been repelled,” Lajevardi said.
The central bank said in September that a cyberattack briefly took its website offline.
Last month, Iranian cyber-security experts foiled a hacking attack on Imam Khomeini Airport City in the south of the capital Tehran, preventing any significant interruption in the airport’s operations.
Muhammad Ja’farabadi, the director general of the airport, said at the time that the so-called Anonymous hackers launched a DDoS attack on the website of the airport, which caused some problems in operations for about fifteen minutes. He said the airport city’s multilayered support system prevented the hackers from taking control of the website.
On Nov. 21, 2022, Iran said a cyberattack on Iran’s Mahan Airlines had been thwarted. In October 2021, a cyberattack caused disruption in the fueling systems at some Iranian gas stations.