The alleged Israeli hacking attack on the Iranian port of Shahid Rajaee in Bandar Abbas, southeastern Iran was deliberately underpowered, and aimed primarily at sending Tehran the message not to try to hack critical Israeli infrastructure, the New York Times reported Wednesday, citing high-ranking intelligence officials.
The hack on the massive port, Iran’s largest, was deliberately “limited in scope,” NYT claimed, with the port chosen as a ‘non-central target’. Damage to the port was limited to traffic jams and a few delayed shipments, but not much else, and no lasting damage was caused. Port officials were said to have detected the attack soon after it began, and switched port management from computer to manual mode for unloading and loading to avoid damage.
Officials said the attack was a ‘direct response’ to an attempted Iranian Revolutionary Guard cyberattack on six Israel Water Authority facilities on April 24. Those alleged attacks were also mostly a dud, causing some “irregularity due to an unplanned change in data,” and the shut off of one pump’s automatic mode, but not much else, after operators detected the hack attempt, disconnected systems, reset parameters and changed passwords.
Intelligence sources told NYT that Tel Aviv did not even plan on ‘retaliating’ to the alleged Iranian cyberattack because of just how “miserable” the utilities hack attack would be even it had succeeded. The decision to ‘retaliate’ was made after Israeli media covered the story, and on the insistence of Defence Minister Naftali Bennett, an Iran hardliner, who was sacked in favour of Blue and White leader Benny Gantz this week.
Neither country’s intelligence services have admitted to responsibility for either of the hacking attacks. On May 10, Iranian officials confirmed that computers regulating shipping traffic were targeted, but stressed that they “failed to penetrate” port systems and proved “able to infiltrate and damage” only “a number of private operating systems at the ports.”
On Tuesday, an anonymous Iranian official reiterated to Tasnim News that civilian defence units at Shahid Rajaee Port prevented any major disruptions at the port during May 9. The official’s comments followed a report by the Washington Post on Monday citing a foreign official who boasted that the cyberattack was “highly accurate” and caused “total disarray” at the port.
