Iran says it has "successfully" tested a firewall it calls the country's “cyber-defense shield", after announcing plans for a test several times before.
The Iranian Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said on Thursday May 16 "Iran's young scientists have developed a cyber-defense shield for the country's automated industrial systems."
Jahromi claimed that the firewall "can practically stop industrial sabotage malware such as Stuxnet in systems including Iran's power grid."
Israel and the United States are widely suspected of deploying the Stuxnet malware, uncovered in 2010, that sabotaged components of Iran’s nuclear program.
Jahromi didn't mention the impact of Stuxnet on Iran's nuclear program. According to media reports including the New York Times, the U.S. and Israeli hackers planted the malware in computers used at Iran's uranium enrichment facilities causing serious damage in the early 2010s.
Iranian hackers have also made the news time and again by infiltrating computers in Europe and the United States, Western research institutes say.
Iran's civil defense chief Gholamreza Jalali told the official news agency IRNA in 2018 that up to 50,000 cyber-attacks target computers in Iran every year.
