Website of Major Iranian News Agency Fars Down After Hack Attack

Iran and its regional archrival Israel have waged a covert cyberwar for years, targeting both virtual and physical infrastructure.

Iran’s Fars News Agency, one of the largest multi-language news services in the Islamic Republic, has been hit by a massive hack attack which has left its website inaccessible.

“Following a complex hacking operation and cyberattack Friday evening, some users’ access to the Fars News Agency’s website was disrupted,” the agency said in a statement on its Telegram page Saturday.

“Cyberattacks on the Fars News Agency are carried out almost non-stop from different countries, including the Occupied Territories,” the agency said, using the term often employed by Iran’s authorities to refer to Israel.

The agency said its websites’ infrastructure is spread across servers in three data centers, and supported by a network of 500 computers, and that combing through them in search for bugs could take several days to complete.

“In the recent attack, hackers were able only to wipe the information and news that was published Friday. Other information and databases of the news agency remain available,” the outlet assured.

A hacker group calling themselves Black Reward claimed to have hacked Fars in late October. The same month, the group claimed responsibility for stealing 50GB of internal emails, construction plans, technical and operational reports, contacts, passport and visa details, and other information from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. The hackers began releasing the hacked materials online after Iranian authorities ignored their demands that people arrested in recent protests plaguing the country be released. On Wednesday, the AEOI acknowledged that “a specific foreign country” had targeted one of its subsidiaries in a hack attack, without elaborating.

Iran and Israel have engaged one another in a years-long cyberwar going back at least to 2010, when the Israeli-US Stuxnet virus infected Iranian nuclear installations, causing them to malfunction. The regional rivals have subsequently staged sabotage attacks targeting software at gas stations, ports, utilities, power plants, security cameras, and alert sirens, and stolen troves of data from sites belonging to one another’s militaries and security forces.

The cyber conflict is complemented by the two nations’ threats to attack one another in real life, with Iran repeatedly warning that it would bombard the Jewish State with missiles if Tel Aviv went ahead with plans to strike the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities.