"In light of recent developments, the likelihood of disruptive cyber attacks against US targets by Iranian actors has increased. In recent years, Iran has primarily focused this activity on Israel, especially following October 7th. Those incidents offer useful insight into the capability and limitations of Iranian actors."However, while an increase in cyber attacks is likely, their impact may be hard to judge in advance.
Hackers backing Tehran have targeted U.S. banks, defense contractors and oil industry companies following American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — but so far have not caused widespread disruptions to critical infrastructure or the economy. But that could change if the ceasefire between Iran and Israel collapses or if independent hacking groups supporting Iran make good on promises to wage their own digital conflict against the U.S., analysts and cyber experts say.
Hacking operations are much cheaper than bullets, planes or nuclear arms — what defense analysts call kinetic warfare. America may be militarily dominant, but its reliance on digital technology poses a vulnerability.
Two pro-Palestinian hacking groups claimed they targeted more than a dozen aviation firms, banks and oil companies following the U.S. strikes over the weekend. The hackers detailed their work in a post on the Telegram messaging service and urged other hackers to follow their lead, according to researchers at the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks the groups' activity. The attacks were denial-of-service attacks, in which a hacker tries to disrupt a website or online network. "We increase attacks from today," one of the hacker groups, known as Mysterious Team, posted Monday.
While it lacks the technical abilities of China or Russia, Iran has long been known as a "chaos agent" when it comes to using cyberattacks to steal secrets, score political points or frighten opponents. Cyberattacks mounted by Iran's government may end if the ceasefire holds and Tehran looks to avoid another confrontation with the U.S. But hacker groups could still retaliate on Iran's behalf.
In some cases, these groups have ties to military or intelligence agencies. In other cases, they act entirely independently. More than 60 such groups have been identified by researchers at the security firm Trustwave.
Economic disruption, confusion and fear are all the goals of such operations, said Mador, who is based in Israel:"We saw the same thing in Russia-Ukraine. While Iran lacks the cyberwarfare capabilities of China or Russia, it has repeatedly tried to use its more modest operations to try to spy on foreign leaders — something national security experts predict Tehran is almost certain to try again as it seeks to suss out President Donald Trump's next moves."Last year, federal authorities charged three Iranian operatives with trying to hack Trump's presidential campaign. It would be wrong to assume Iran has given up those efforts, according to Jake Williams, a former National Security Agency cybersecurity expert.
"It's fairly certain that these limited resources are being used for intelligence collection to understand what Israel or the U.S. might be planning next, rather than performing destructive attacks against U.S. commercial organizations."
What is Palestine Action?
Palestine Action describes itself as a movement "committed to ending global participation in Israel's genocidal and apartheid regime". The group was launched in July 2020.
The group says it seeks to use "disruptive tactics" to target "corporate enablers" and companies involved in weapons manufacture for Israel, such as Israel-based Elbit Systems, Italian aerospace company Leonardo, French multinational Thales and United States company Teledyne. The group has targeted British facilities linked to these companies.
"Palestine Action is a direct action group who have majoritively focused on weapons factories that are operating on British soil and are complicit in the current genocide in Gaza, but also in the longer-term kind of oppression of the Palestinian people," Manaal Siddiqui, a spokesperson for Palestine Action, told Al Jazeera.
In 2022, the group broke into a Thales equipment factory in Glasgow, causing damage to weapons worth more than 1 million pounds ($1.4m).
In 2021, members of Palestine Action protested on the rooftop of Elbit Systems' subsidiary UAV Tactical Systems in Leicester for six days, until a number of them were arrested by the police.
[...]
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said in a statement on Monday that she had decided to proscribe the group under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Cooper's statement came days after June 20, when some Palestine Action activists broke into RAF Brize Norton, the largest station of the Royal Air Force in Oxfordshire, and sprayed two military planes with red paint.
In the most high-profile move made by the group so far, the activists sprayed red paint into the turbine engines of two Airbus Voyager aircraft, used for air-to-air refuelling, and damaged them with crowbars.
[...]
Siddiqui, however, said Brize Norton stores aircraft "which are going to be used around the world, but particularly in Gaza". She added that they have also been used in Syria and Yemen.
Israel's war in Gaza, which began on October 7, 2023, has killed more than 56,000 Palestinians.
"These aircraft can be used to refuel and have been used to refuel Israeli fighter jets," Siddiqui said, adding that planes from Brize Norton go to the British air force base in Cyprus, from where they are "dispatched on spy missions and that intelligence is shared with the Israeli government and the Israeli air forces".
"No. I want to see everything calm down as quickly as possible. Regime change takes chaos, and ideally, we don't want to see so much chaos. So we'll see how it goes."He told reporters on Air Force One on the way to The Hague for the NATO summit:
"The Iranians are very good traders, very good businesspeople, and they got a lot of oil. They should be fine. They should be able to rebuild and do a good job. They're never going to have nuclear. But other than that, they should do a great job, which is exactly what I've been saying for years."Before leaving the White House, the president railed against Israel and Iran for continuing to fight overnight after the president announced the parameters of a ceasefire the day before.
Comment: Note: 300 Billion is about 13-14 % of the Russian GDP. Imagine doing that to another country?
1) While the West has promoted itself as being a champion of the rule of law, there are many examples that indicate the promoters act in accordance with the rule of outlaws; that is, they do whatever they can get away with.
2) Another interpretation of the calls for using the frozen Russian assets, is that the Western elites may be assuming that Russia as a legal entity and potential claimant, can be done away with.
- SOTT Focus: The Hidden Logic Behind the Iran-Israel War: It's Not Just About Iran. It's About Saving the Dollar (Jun 2025) If the USD collapses, would the Euro too? Both would similarly encourage countries to trade or barter between themselves.
- U.S. strategic aim: Break and dismember Russia; or maintain U.S. dollar hegemony? Or a muddled 'both'? (Jan 2023)
- The Brits & Ukrainians plot to manipulate Trump into an escalation against Russia (Jun 2025)
- Vladimir Kornilov: Time to drop our illusions, the West is waging a war to destroy Russia (Sep 20, 2022, [This was a week before the Nord Stream bombing in the Baltic Sea!])
- US gov't body plots to break up Russia in name of 'decolonization' (Jun 2022)
- Czech military expert: NATO planned to dismember Russia in the '90s (Jul 2019)
3) In the process and aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution and following the break up of the USSR around 1990, huge amounts moved from the area of Russia and later USSR to the West. What is happening now is a continuation. The silver lining of the affair is, as Putin suggests, that there will be a shift toward regional payment systems, and this shift is already being fueled by sanctions policies.