One week after the servers of the Iranian regime parliament were breached and sensitive documents were revealed, the regime continues to grapple with mitigating its ramifications. Ahmad Sadeghi, a member of the Tehran City Council, disclosed on Sunday that even after eight months since the hacking of the capital’s municipal systems, the regime is still struggling to address the disruption in these systems.
He revealed that despite all efforts, not only have they failed to improve the system, but in many cases, they are witnessing regressions, highlighting the weakness of the regime’s capabilities in countering cyber attacks. He added:
“It has been a long time since this cyber attack, but we are still facing challenges and problems in terms of improvements, and it is necessary for the authorities of Tehran Municipality to address this issue.”
More than eight months ago, on June 2, 2023, on the eve of the death anniversary of Ruhollah Khomeini, a group known as the “Uprising Till Overthrow” disrupted the functionality of over 5,000 surveillance and security cameras in the capital, and over 150 websites and servers of the Tehran Municipality were taken down.
This group claimed responsibility for the attack, stating that it had disabled ‘5138 surveillance cameras’ as well as several systems of the Tehran Municipality.
Following this attack, the Tehran municipality announced on June 6, 2023, that ‘only certain devices are able to activate their computers to carry out essential tasks under the direction of the highest authority and in coordination with the Technology and Information Organization of the city of Tehran for protection.’
Simultaneously, Mehdi Chamran, head of the Tehran City Council, deemed the scope of the cyber attack on municipal systems to be much broader than the disruption of the smart fuel system, stating: ‘This attack cannot be compared to the cyber attack on the smart fuel system. In that case, only one system and one department were targeted, but the municipality has a very extensive system with over 50,000 users, contractors, and clients.’
A short time later, on June 26, 2023, Jafarbandi Sharbiani, another member of the city council, also stated that ‘the electronic document archive is still experiencing disruptions or delays.’
Previously, there were reports of ongoing disruptions in municipal systems, and now Ahmad Sadeghi, a member of the Tehran City Council, has confirmed that more than eight months after the June 2 attack, the ‘disruption in municipal systems’ persists.
The systems and IT infrastructure have increasingly been targeted in recent years, with the trend accelerating in the past few months.
One major event was the disruption of the smart fuel system on October 26, 2021, resulting in gasoline pumps being shut down and fuel distribution, particularly the use of fuel cards, halted for several days. A similar attack recurred on December 18, 2023.
Other notable targets include the Ministry of Agriculture Jihad, Fars News Agency, the CCTV cameras of the notorious Evin Prison, city and airport digital billboards, IRIB’s live broadcasting system, the Snapfood app, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and hacking of the presidential institution systems.
The parliament is the latest target of dissidents. The breach resulted in the publication of sensitive documents regarding the allocation of additional budgets of trillions of tomans to the armed forces and IRGC Quds Force, the allocation of the budget for the purchase of raw materials for petrochemical gasoline production, and the astronomical income documents of regime MPs.
