Gas stations across Iran halted sales on Tuesday after a government electronic card payment system controlling fuel subsidies suffered a software glitch caused by incident, described as a "cyberattack" by semi-official ISNA news agency.
The incident affected the IT network of Iran's state-owned oil products distributor NIOPDC.
Abolhassan Firoozabadi, secretary of the Supreme Council of Cyber Space, told state television on Tuesday that the incident had the characteristics of a cyberattack and was related not to distribution or production of fuel but rather to the cyber management of petrol stations. He also added that the attack was likely carried out by a "foreign country" without providing any further details.
So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the outage.
The ISNA news agency said it saw motorists trying to buy fuel with a government-issued card through the machines instead receive a message reading ‘cyberattack 64411’. The 64411 number is the phone number for the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The same ‘cyberattack 64411’ message along with ‘Khamenei where is the gas?’ was displayed on gas price billboards located in Iranian major cities.
The use of the number 64411 mirrored an attack in July on Iran’s railway system in which the same number was displayed. At the time, researchers at SentinelOne linked the attack to a previously undocumented wiper malware, which they dubbed ‘Meteor,’ capable of deleting data on infected systems.