Iran denied on Saturday that its oil fields had been successfully attacked during a cyber operation, after online reports emerged of disruptions in the oil sector.
“Contrary to Western media claims, investigations done today show no successful cyber attack was made on the country’s oil installations and other crucial infrastructure", the government’s cyber security office said, as cited by AFP.
According to NetBlocks, an organisation that tracks internet outages and shutdowns, some “network data show intermittent disruptions to internet connectivity in #Iran", although it acknowledged that "the cause was unclear and impact limited", affecting primarily “online industrial and government platforms".
Iran’s Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi earlier admitted that Tehran had indeed been “facing cyber terrorism — such as Stuxnet”, a virus believed to have been devised in a joint effort by the US and Israel.
On 2 September, Yahoo News published a feature about a Dutch mole who planted Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm that damaged around 2,000 centrifuges used in the uranium enrichment process at Iran's secretive nuclear plant near the village of Natanz in 2007.
The purported undercover cyber war still persists, as The New York Times revealed in late August 2019.
According to the media outlet, US Cyber Command attacked an Iranian shipping management database on 20 June, following attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman that were hastily blamed on the Islamic Republic by Washington - something that Tehran has denied outright.
