A brief timeline of Iranian cyberattacks on U.S. companies, political figures, water systems and more

Key Points:

• Investigators are examining whether Iranian hackers were responsible for recent cyberattacks targeting water systems in seven U.S. states, including Minnesota, with official confirmation potentially taking weeks or months.
• Iranian-linked cyber actors have a history of attacking U.S. targets since 2011, including banks, government agencies, defense contractors, and critical infrastructure, often aiming to disrupt, intimidate, or gather intelligence.
• Notable past incidents include distributed denial-of-service attacks on U.S. banks (2011-2013), hacking of a New York dam control system (2013), destructive attacks on Las Vegas Sands (2014), and ransomware campaigns targeting schools and municipalities (2017-2024).
• Iranian actors have also been implicated in election-related cyber activities, such as sending threatening emails to voters and officials in 2020 and hacking political campaign accounts in 2024 to sow discord and undermine confidence in the electoral process.
• Recent attacks by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), like CyberAv3ngers, have targeted programmable logic controllers in water systems, causing operational disruptions and displaying anti-Israel messages.