Elliptic also confirmed in its blog post about the attack that crypto tracing shows Nobitex does in fact have links with sanctioned IRGC operatives, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group. “It’s also an act of sabotage, by attacking a financial institution that was pivotal in Iran’s use of cryptocurrency to evade sanctions,” Robinson says.
Predatory Sparrow has long been one of the most aggressive cyberwarfare-focused groups in the world. The hackers, who are widely believed to have links to Israel’s military or intelligence agencies, have for years targeted Iran with an intermittent barrage of carefully planned attacks on the country’s critical infrastructure. The group has targeted Iran’s railways with data-destroying attacks and twice disabled payment systems at thousands of Iranian gas stations, triggering nationwide fuel shortages. In 2022, it carried out perhaps the most physically destructive cyberattack in history, hijacking industrial control systems at the Khouzestan steel mill to cause a massive vat of molten steel to spill onto the floor, setting the plant on fire and nearly burning staff there alive, as shown in the group’s own video of the attack posted to its YouTube account.
Exactly why Predatory Sparrow has now turned its attention to Iran’s financial sector—whether because it sees those financial institutions as the most consequential or merely because its banks and crypto exchanges were vulnerable enough to offer a target of opportunity—remains unclear for now, says John Hultquist, chief analyst on Google’s threat intelligence group and a longtime tracker of Predatory Sparrow’s attacks. Almost any conflict, he notes, now includes cyberattacks from hacktivists or state-sponsored hackers. But the entry of Predatory Sparrow in particular into this war suggests there may yet be more to come, with serious consequences.
“This actor is very serious and very capable, and that’s what separates them from many of the operations that we’ll probably see in the coming weeks or months,” Hultquist says. “A lot of actors are going to make threats. This is one that can follow through on those threats.”
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
