Iran accused of attempting cyber-attack on World Health Organisation

Iran has been accused of attempting to hack into the personal email accounts of staff at the World Health Organization during a severe outbreak of coronavirus.

The attempted cyber attack, which appears to have failed, had several links with the Iranian regime according to Reuters news agency, which said it had confirmed the hack with four sources.

"We’ve seen some targeting by what looks like Iranian government-backed attackers targeting international health organisations generally via phishing," said one of the sources, a cyber-security expert who works for a major technology firm.

Phishing is a type of cyber-attack where the personal details of the victim, such as their username and password for an email account, are obtained by subterfuge. 

In this case, the hackers appear to have posed as workers for Google web services to obtain passwords and other data. Reuters said the cyber attacks took place from March 2 onwards. 

Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the World Health Organization (WHO), confirmed that several staff email addresses had been targeted by hackers, but added that "to the best of our knowledge, none of these hacking attempts were successful."

Iran has denied any involvement. “These are all sheer lies to put more pressure on Iran,” said a spokesman at Iran’s information technology ministry. “Iran has been a victim of hacking.”

However, the Reuters report said some aspects of the cyber-attack were similar to previous Iranian-led phishing campaigns.

For example, it found that "the same malicious websites used in the WHO break-in attempts were deployed around the same time to target American academics with ties to Iran."

Iran has suffered a high death toll from the coronavirus, and infections have reached the inner circle of the country’s leadership.

A source close to US intelligence told Reuters he was aware of the Iranian campaign and that such attacks were standard fare during times of international crisis.