TEHRAN — The telecommunications minister announced on Sunday that Iran has defused a “systematic cyberattack” aimed at spying on government data.

Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said in a Twitter post that the attack was identified and defused by a cybersecurity shield named Dejfa.

He said the spying servers were identified and the hackers were also tracked.

Dejfa managed to thwart the attack which had used the “well-known APT27”, he said.

Last week, Azari Jahromi said Iran had repelled a cyberattack on its e-governance infrastructure.

He said the cyberattack was launched by a foreign government.

“We recently faced a highly organized and state-sponsored attack on our e-government infrastructure which was...repelled by the country’s security shield,” Azari Jahromi told reporters after a cabinet meeting last Wednesday.

The major attack was repelled by Dejfa, the minister added.

“It was a very big attack,” Azari-Jahromi said, adding that details would be revealed later.

Back in June, Washington officials said that U.S. military cyber forces launched a strike against Iranian military computer systems as President Donald Trump backed away from plans for a more conventional military strike in response to Iran’s downing of a U.S. surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf.

U.S. officials told Reuters in October that the United States had carried out a secret cyber strike on Iran after the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi oil facilities, which Washington and Riyadh claimed Iran was responsible for. 

In a post on his Twitter account back in June, Azari Jahromi said Iran had managed to thwart about 33 million cyber-attacks against its sensitive sites last year (March 2018-March 2019).

“Last year, we neutralized not a single strike but 33 million attacks with the Dejfa firewall,” he wrote, stressing that the U.S. tries hard but has not carried out a successful attack.

Head of the Civil Defense Organization Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali said in October that Iran was taking legal action against the U.S. over repeated cyberattack attempts and threats, while it is putting in place robust security measures to protect its vital infrastructure.

“The Americans have repeatedly threatened and mounted cyberattacks against us,” Jalali said.

Tensions have escalated between the U.S. and Iran ever since U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew Washington last year from the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran and began a policy of “maximum pressure.” Iran has since been hit by multiple rounds of sanctions.

MH/PA