Iran confirms that spy malware
called Dino is targeting sensitive centers inside the country
since one and half years ago.
Masoud Biglarian, head of the
Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (CERTCC), said
that after malware was discovered the CERTCC which is subset of the
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sent a secret report
to the countrys officials about the issue.
According to Irans Mehr news agency Biglarian said: «We took appropriate measures to prevent
damage to the strategic centers of the country by Dino».
He also said that Dino is a type of
Spyware such as Stuxnet that is designed for specific
purposes and launches targeted attacks.
He rejected claims that the malware
infected some sensitive centers inside the country.
Last week some western media outlets
reported that Dino malware which searches for specific data and
steals it has infected some organizations inside Iran.
Security firm ESET researchers
in Bratislava, Slovakia identified the sophisticated Dino Trojan that
attacked Iranian and Syrian targets in 2013 and it is rumor that the
group is a secret part of the French Intelligence service.
Dino was supposedly created by the
so-called Animal Farm Group which also created other Trojans
like Bunny, Casper and Babar. Casper malwares
claim to fame is that it was involved in a large scale attack on
computer systems in Syria last autumn.
ESET claims that Dinos main goal
seems to be the exfiltration of files from its targets.
Large scale cyber attacks on Iranian
facilities started in 2010 after the US and Israel reportedly tried
to disrupt the operation of Irans nuclear facilities through a worm
that later became known as Stuxnet.
US intelligence officials revealed in
June 2013 that the Stuxnet malware was not only designed to disrupt
the Irans nuclear program but also was part of a wider
campaign directed from Israel that included assassination of
the countrys nuclear scientists.
Stuxnet is the first discovered worm
that spies on industrial systems and reprograms them. It is written
specifically to attack SCADA systems that are used to control
and monitor industrial processes.
In September 2013 the Islamic
Republic of Iran said that the computer worm Stuxnet infected 30
000 IP addresses in Iran but it denied reports that the cyber worm
had damaged computer systems at the countrys nuclear power plants.
