The government of Iran appears to have shut down the internet within its borders, perhaps in response to Israel-linked cyberattacks.
Internet watchers at CloudFlare and NetBlocks both report that internet traffic in Iran dropped precipitously late on Wednesday and has remained near zero since.
Cloudflare cited a Telegram post from the Tehran-based outlet Khabaronline News Agency, which says Iran’s Ministry of Communications temporarily restricted internet access to “prevent enemy abuse”.
One possible example of such abuse is a disruption at Iran’s Bank Sepah.
A group called Predatory Sparrow, which has previously boasted of attacks on Iranian targets and is thought to have Israel’s backing, has claimed responsibility for the outage at the Bank.
Rob Joyce, who briefly served as acting Homeland Security Advisor in the first Trump administration, shared his view that Predatory Sparrow took down Bank Sepah and also attacked Iranian crypto exchange Nobitex.
Earlier, Tehran reportedly asked its citizens to delete Meta’s messaging app WhatsApp, on the grounds that it enabled surveillance. Meta denied that allegation.
Whatever is happening online in Iran, much of it came after the head of the Israeli Defense Force’s intelligence division, Major General Shlomi Binder, spoke to his staff and foreshadowed breakthroughs in “other areas”. Some have taken that remark to indicate a coming cyber-offensive.
The Register occasionally accesses Iranian websites to inform our regional coverage. Access is usually slow, but possible. At the time of writing, we can’t access any websites in the .IR domain, the code top-level domain for Iran. ®
