A senior commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps claimed on
Sunday that Iran has managed to infiltrate and decrypt its enemies’ highly
classified data.
R.-Adm. Ali Fadavi of the IRGC’s naval branch said that
the navy’s cyber corps had “infiltrated the enemy’s most sensitive information”
and successfully promoted “cyberwar code,” according to a report on Sepah News,
the IRGC’s official news site.
Fadavi did not specify the name of any
particular enemy, but went on to talk about what he called “imperialistic
domination,” referring to Iran’s “enmity with America.”
The IRGC rear
admiral claimed that Iran’s enemies were increasing their activity in cyberspace
and on satellite networks.
Fadavi added that in the past month alone,
“counterrevolutionaries” had improved their Persian-language networks, and
therefore Iran must direct its resources to this area by deploying its own
experts.
Fadavi added that information security must be a priority for
the IRGC.
“If we do not have sufficient data security, our enemies could
easily take advantage and collect intelligence.
The enemy is willing to
spend billions to get the tiniest bit of our data,” Fadavi added.
Fadavi
was speaking at a ceremony in Tehran to open the IRGC naval branch’s new
information technology systems.
The naval branch of the IRGC, which
oversees operations in the Persian Gulf, is 12,000-15,000 strong, according to
the United States Institute of Peace.
Fadavi’s comments came a week after
a group calling itself the Iranian DataCoders Security Team claimed on its
Facebook page that it had hacked 370 “Zionist websites.”
The group also
maintains a website with an Internet discussion forum, which is currently not
working but is registered to an address and telephone number in Kermanshah,
Iran.
Fadavi’s remarks also come after the deputy commander of the IRGC’s
ground forces said last week that Iran believed a cyber war was more dangerous
than a conventional war.
Iran had developed “new tools” to fight cyber
war, Maj.-Gen. Abdollah Araghi said.
Iran has cracked down on cyber
security since 2010, when its uranium enrichment centrifuges were hit by the
Stuxnet virus. In April, Iran’s main oil export terminal on Kharg Island was hit
by a computer virus that forced the authorities to disconnect the terminal from
the Internet.