He said the attack Sunday had no effect on oil operations because the servers with information for the public are separate from those used to handle oil operations.
He didn’t say what was impacted in Sunday’s attack. The Iran Times accessed the English site of Shana, the Oil Ministry’s news service, on both Sunday and Monday and found no problems either time. Multiple Iranian news agencies said the websites of the NIOC and the Oil Ministry were both down for several hours.
The Mehr news agency gave a different account from the one carried by Fars. Mehr said Kharg Island, Iran’s main export terminal, and other unnamed facilities came under attack from malware and hackers. Mehr asserted that the Oil Ministry then disconnected itself from the Internet to foil the attack, though a disconnection after the fact would appear to be too late.
Mehr quoted Hamdollah Mohammad-nejad, deputy oil minister in charge of civil defense, as saying the attack began Sunday and the ministry was then taken offline.
Such conflicting accounts coming from official agencies have become commonplace in recent years. In some cases, it is suspected that agencies are peddling falsehoods to avoid embarrassment, but in many other cases the problem looks to stem from laziness and ineptitude as officials simply show little interest in tracking down factual explanations.
One Iranian computer security specialist, Ali Jahangiri, said he had doubts there was any cyber attack. “There is no indication that this is definitely a targeted attack from the outside,” he said. “It could be a technical failure inside the Oil Ministry’s own systems.”