A new report has revealed that Iranian hackers attempted to “poison” Israel’s civilian water supply when it attacked Israeli water infrastructure last month.
The failed Iranian cyberattack on a water facility in Israel in April sought to poison the water supply delivered to hundreds of thousands of homes in the greater Tel Aviv area, The Financial Times reported on Sunday.
According to the report, the Iranian hackers sought to trick the facility’s computers into exponentially increasing the amount of chlorine added to the water, which would have made it extremely hazardous.
Additionally there was a chance that the attack would have triggered a fail-safe, shutting down the pumps and leaving thousands without water during during the recent deadly heatwave in Israel.
“It was more sophisticated than they [Israel] initially thought,” the Western official said. “It was close to successful, and it’s not fully clear why it didn’t succeed.”
An unnamed Israeli official told the Financial Times that the attack created “an unpredictable risk scenario”.
Israel is suspected of being a recent cyber strike on Iran’s Shahid Rajaee port in retaliation for their targeting of the water facility.
Israeli officials claim this attack was minor in comparison to Israel’s capabilities.
“It was small, very small — like a knock on the door,” said one official. “Think of it [as] a gentle reminder. ‘We know where you live.’”
In an apparent sign that Iran is concerned about Israel’s ability to strike Iran through technology, Iran’s President Rouhani banned all Israeli technology in Iran last week.
Rouhani ordered the Iranian Interior, Intelligence, Foreign, and Defense ministries, as well as the Supreme National Security Council and the judiciary, to implement a law approved last week by Tehran’s parliament and the Guardian Council – an oversight body that ensures laws adhere to Islamic – that aims to “confront the hostile acts of the Zionist regime against peace and security.”
“Based on the first article of the bill, all Iranian bodies are required to use the country’s regional and international capacities to confront the Zionist regime’s measures, especially its warmongering and terrorist moves, siege (of Gaza), settlement construction, displacing the Palestinian people and occupation of countries’ lands, including Golan,” Hossein Naqavi Hosseini a member of the Iranian National Security and Foreign Policy Commission told Fars.
He further said that “any cooperation or spying for the Zionist regime is equal to enmity towards God and corruption on earth,” and that using Israeli software or hardware on Iranian platforms was forbidden.
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