One of Iran’s major steel companies says it foiled a cyberattack
apparently targeting the country’s strategic industrial sector.
The Khuzestan Steel Company CEO Amin Ebrahimi said Monday the
mill managed to thwart the cyberattack and prevent structural damage to
production lines that would impact supply chains and customers.
“Fortunately with time and awareness, the attack was
unsuccessful,” the Mehr news agency quoted Ebrahimi as saying, adding that he
expected everything to return to “normal” by the end of Monday.
A local news channel, Jamaran, reported that the attack failed
because the factory happened to be non-operational at the time due to an
electricity outage.
Last year, a cyberattack on Iran’s fuel distribution targeted
gas stations across the country. Officials have previously pointed the finger
at the United States and Israel.
The US and Israel are widely believed to be behind the first
state cyber terrorism through the Stuxnet computer virus which disrupted some
of Iran's centrifuges in the country’s nuclear sites in the late 2000s. Since
then, Iran has disconnected much of its government infrastructure from the
internet.
Khuzestan Steel Company, based in Ahvaz in the oil-rich southwestern
Khuzestan province, is a major steel producer in Iran along with two other
major firms.
Founded before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the company for
decades afterward had some production lines supplied by German, Italian and
Japanese companies. Service has been continuous except during the Iraqi war of
the 1980s on Iran, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his army across the
border to occupy Khuzestan.
However, draconian sanctions on Iran have forced the company to
reduce its dependence on foreign parts.
Iran’s steel exports have faced an increasingly hostile terrain
in Europe where the bloc’s executive body, the European Commission, has levied
trade tariffs against Iranian products.
The steel industry has been growing rapidly in recent years in
line with the country’s ambitious plan to raise output to 55 million tonnes per
year by 2015.