Page 57 - IRANRptJun22

Iran set to resume issuing tourist visas in late October
altering of a legislative clause that presently forbade the city government from entering into developments with a large footprint, he added.
After foreign brands departed Iran under US pressure, many newly constructed hotels across the country were left to operate under local brands, without any foreign oversight. This was the case with two airport hotels originally due to come under the Ibis Group. In recent months, they have been slated for staff unprofessionalism on Trip Advisor.
Iranians and expatriates from 2016-2018 invested in renovating hundreds of historic buildings to create guesthouses in cities including Tehran, Kashan and Shiraz. Such investments have been hit by poor trade in recent years, partly due to the effect Washington’s renewed hostility to Iran had on international tourism in the country and partly due to the impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Many of the guesthouses were mothballed.
Iran resumes issuing tourist visas, Iran’s Minister for Tourism and Cultural Heritage Ezatollah Zarghami announced, according to Mehr News. Tourism to Iran has all but come to a halt given the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that started early last year, with tourism visas issued to 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
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
57 IRAN Country Report June 2022 www.intellinews.com