Page 8 - IRANRptNov21

2.2 Iran points finger at Israel, US for cyber attack that knocked out fuel provision at petrol stations
A cyber attack that knocked out fuel distribution at the pump at around 4,000 petrol stations across Iran was likely the work of Israel and the US, according to the head of the Iranian civil defence unit responsible for cyber activity.
The October 26 attack, which caused snaking queues of traffic across the country, "technically" resembled two previous incidents whose perpetrators "were unquestionably our enemies, namely the United States and the Zionist regime," Gholamreza Jalali was quoted by AFP as saying on state television late on October 30.
"We have analysed two incidents, the railway accident and the Shahid Rajaei port accident, and we found that they were similar," Jalali added.
There are theories in circulation that anti-Islamic Republic non-state groups could have been behind the cyber action against the petrol station network, and a little-known hacktivist group calling itself Predatory Sparrow took responsibility for the attack. But experts said the incident bore the hallmarks of a state-sponsored attack.
"I think the ability to penetrate, to breach critical information, a system, is something that may reflect nation-state capabilities rather than local opposition or hacktivists' capabilities," Tel-Aviv based cyber security expert Tal Pavel told RFE/RL on October 29, adding: "We’ve also never seen such a thing in the past by hacktivists."
Pavel, director and founder of the Institute for Cyber Policy Studies in Israel, also commented: "The message here is that we not only have the capabilities to breach your infrastructure system—a system that will immediately affect Iran from border to border—but also to cripple [it]. It’s not by mistake that the entity that did the attack chose gas stations.”
In Iran, motorists are issued digital smart cards that entitle them to a monthly amount of petrol at a subsidised price. Once the quota, the motorist must buy petrol at the market rate. The cyber disruption hit the state computer systems, blocking the use of such cards.
The oil ministry eventually opted to take service stations offline so that petrol could be distributed manually, according to the authorities.
President Ebrahim Raisi on October 27 accused the perpetrators behind the cyber attack on petrol stations of trying to turn Iran's people against the leadership of the Islamic republic.
Around 3,200 of the country's 4,300 service stations had been reconnected to the central distribution system since the cyber attack, the National Oil Products Distribution Company said, as quoted on October 30 by state news agency IRNA.
8 IRAN Country Report November 2021 www.intellinews.com