Iranian oil ministry servers hacked

cyber attack, and a specialised team has been assembled to confront it, Iranian media reported on Monday, Geo writes.

The Mehr news agency reported that the oil ministry Web site, as well as that of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), were targeted from Sunday. Quoting a civil defence official at the ministry, it said a "cyber crisis committee" was established to fend off the attack.

A ministry spokesman, Alireza Nikzad, told the Fars news agency the attack was a "virus" that "attempted to delete data on oil ministry servers", The International News reports.

The ISNA news agency, identifying the virus as "Viper", said the attack had deleted data off the servers. The ministry spokesman, however, said "essential data" was unharmed.

"The cyber attack has not harmed essential data of the oil ministry and the NIOC because the main servers are not connected to public servers," Nikzad said, adding that data was available on offline servers. He did not give further details.

The Trojan was able to take the ministry's Web sites offline and access data on some of its users. After a similar attack in 2010 - stemming from the now-infamous Stuxnet worm - an official from the organisation, Hamdollah Nejad, told Mehr that they have kept their operational servers disconnected from public access and regularly utilise backup hard drives to protect against disruptions, Storage Craft says.

Nejad said the ministry had learned from the previous attack, which helped it prepare so well for the most recent Trojan. He said server backup existed for all affected files.

The Telegraph, however, reported that the ministry set up a team to deal with any possible fallout from the attacks, but that the Iranian government is downplaying the attack. There have been no reported changes in oil production or exporting due to the hack, and the country still says the ministry went offline voluntarily and not due to a forced outage.