Page 57 - IRANRptJul22

foreigners outside the country mostly postponed and the visa-on-arrival scheme frozen at all airports. But with a redoubled drive to vaccinate Iranians against coronavirus, the prospect of allowing foreign tourists to visit became feasible, officials have said.
“By an order of President [Ebrahim Raisi] the issuance of tourist visas and the flow of foreign tourists from land and air borders resumed from [the Persian calendar month of] Aban [October 23 – November 21], following 19 months of suspension,” Zarghami was quoted as saying.
Prior to the pandemic, 240,000 people were directly employed and 550,000 were indirectly employed in the Iranian tourism industry, industry estimates suggest.
9.1.6 TMT sector news
Hackers reportedly take over Tehran CCTV infrastructure, call for overthrow of government
Iran may be heartbeat away from first unicorn
A hacker group on June 2 claimed to have temporarily taken over the Tehran CCTV infrastructure run by the Iranian capital’s municipality.
The Albania-based Mujahedeen-e-Khalk (MEK), a Marxist-Islamist group that has worked to oppose the Iranian regime since the Islamic Revolution of more than four decades ago, claimed responsibility for the unprecedented cyberattack.
The hackers, according to ISNA, "infiltrated" surveillance cameras, including around the Tehran mausoleum of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The attack came on the eve of the June 3 anniversary of the 1989 death of the first supreme leader of Iran.
The MEK also reportedly released a video that showed the municipality's website and other sites hit by broken graphics and a picture of Khomeini and called for "rebellion until the government is overthrown."
Offering further details of the disruption caused to the Tehran municipality by the hackers, Iran's Young Journalists Club (YJC) news agency said the city authority’s websites and intranet system became temporarily unavailable. "Deliberate disruption in the internal systems of Tehran's municipality, including the publishing of an insulting image, put this system out of reach for colleagues for a few minutes," the municipality was quoted as saying by YJC.
YJC added that the hacker group published videos from the municipality's data centre to demonstrate that it had taken over the CCTV infrastructure of the city. Tehran's municipality acknowledged the hack in response to media inquiries and said it had plugged the hole in its system.
In October last year, a cyberattack on a nationwide fuel card payment system for subsidised gasoline paralysed petrol stations, causing chaos and traffic jams across the country. Earlier last year, hackers infiltrated the passenger information system serving passengers at train stations across Iran.
Iran’s Information and Communications Technology News Agency (ICTNA) lately caused a stir by reporting on claims that the country would soon get its first unicorn startup.
Shahram Shahkar, administrative manager at ride-hailing app business Snapp!, was said to have claimed at the Silk Road Startup Conference on the Persian Gulf island of Kish that the company would soon hit the $1bn valuation that grants unicorn status. Snapp!, following in Uber’s footsteps, by branching beyond simply ride-hailing, was moving into hotel reservation apps and, in collaboration with Irancell, also SnappPay software. Snapp! already offers food and package delivery services in Iran, a country of 85mn.
Inventiva, in a recent assessment of the top 10 potential unicorns in Iran, noted that Snapp!, starting off as Taxi Yaab in 2014, “did not have to market taxi
57 IRAN Country Report July 2022 www.intellinews.com