Iranian state media has alleged that equipment from Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and MikroTik failed during U.S. and Israeli military operations against Iran. The report, which claims that “American ‘black boxes’ failed at zero hour of the attack on Isfahan,” concerns devices that Iran claims either rebooted or dropped offline despite the country having already been disconnected from the global Internet, a fact it says "indicates deep sabotage."
Iranian media speculates that hidden firmware or backdoors allowed remote sabotage, possibly triggered by satellite or at a pre-set time. None of the claims has been independently verified, and given that the claims originate from state media, some skepticism is merited.
Meanwhile, the U.S. hasn’t addressed Iran's specific allegations, but has publicly confirmed that it conducted cyber operations against Iran's communications infrastructure. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, said during a March 2nd Pentagon briefing that U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Space Command were the “first movers” in so-called Operation Epic Fury, the military campaign launched against Iran at the end of February. Caine said coordinated space and cyber operations disrupted Iranian communications and sensor networks before strikes began.
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Chinese state media seized the opportunity to pile on Iran’s claims, with the country’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, which has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. fabricated the Volt Typhoon hacking campaign to deflect from its own cyber operations, promoted the allegations as further evidence of American backdoors in networking hardware. Five Eyes intelligence agencies have attributed Volt Typhoon to Chinese state-sponsored actors targeting Western critical infrastructure.
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