{"id":318310,"date":"2026-03-02T19:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T19:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/318310\/"},"modified":"2026-03-02T19:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T19:15:08","slug":"uk-firms-in-middle-east-face-heightened-threat-from-iran-hackers-agency-warns-cyberwar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/318310\/","title":{"rendered":"UK firms in Middle East face heightened threat from Iran hackers, agency warns | Cyberwar"},"content":{"rendered":"

UK businesses with a presence in the Middle East have been urged to step up vigilance against cyber threats from Iran after US-Israeli attacks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The National Cyber Security Centre<\/a> (NCSC) said there was \u201calmost certainly\u201d a heightened risk of an indirect cyber threat for organisations that had offices, or supply chains, in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

The UK\u2019s cybersecurity agency said Iran<\/a> remained a threat despite an extensive bombing campaign that has devastated the country\u2019s political and military leadership, including the death of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.<\/p>\n

\u201cIranian state and Iran-linked cyber actors almost certainly currently maintain at least some capability to conduct cyber activity,\u201d said the NCSC.<\/p>\n

The agency said in an alert published on Monday<\/a> that there was \u201clikely\u201d no significant change in the direct cyber threat from Iran to the UK, but organisations should prepare for the risk of collateral damage from Iran-linked hacktivists. It said organisations with a presence in the region should consider boosting monitoring of their IT systems and follow NCSC guidelines for dealing with a heightened threat of cyber-attacks.<\/p>\n

Jonathon Ellison, the NCSC\u2019s director for national resilience, said UK organisations and key infrastructure providers \u2013 such as airports and power stations \u2013 needed to \u201cact now\u201d in protecting themselves from potential attacks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn light of rapidly evolving events in the Middle East, it is critical that all UK organisations remain alert to the potential risk of cyber compromise, particularly those with assets or supply chains that are in areas of regional tensions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Iran was blamed for a series of high-profile cyber-attacks between 2012 and 2014, against US financial institutions, the oil company Saudi Aramco and the Las Vegas-based Sands hotel and casino company.<\/p>\n

Rafe Pilling, the director of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity company Sophos, said the UK was unlikely to be \u201chigh up\u201d the list of targets for Iranian attacks but British companies could be caught up in forays by state-backed hackers.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of these hack groups will go after targets opportunistically,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Pilling added that Iran was not as effective a cyber adversary as China<\/a> or Russia<\/a>, but as shown by the 2012-14 attacks, it could still cause problems. \u201cIran is not up there with China and Russia in terms of sophistication and scale, but it\u2019s not to be underestimated,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity firm, has said it is already seeing threatening activity from Iran-linked hackers including initiation of so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks, where assailants attempt to overwhelm a target\u2019s servers with a flood of internet traffic.<\/p>\n

Cynthia Kaiser, a former top official in the FBI\u2019s cyber division and a senior vice-president at the anti-ransomware company Halcyon, said Iran\u2019s cyber operations came from a \u201cmurky blend of state sponsorship, personal profiteering, and outright criminal behaviour\u201d.<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cAs Iran considers its response to US and Israeli military actions, it is likely to activate any of these cyber actors if it believes their operations can deliver a meaningful retaliatory impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaiser said Halcyon had detected activity consistent with Iranian state groups trying to steal data from organisations that maintained significant personal records, probably to identify and locate potential Iranian dissidents. She added that a significant threat to companies operating in the Middle East could be physical attacks on datacentres that could \u201cdelay or stop business operations until a suitable alternative is brought online\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UK businesses with a presence in the Middle East have been urged to step up vigilance against cyber…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":318311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-318310","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}