TEHRAN - The head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization has said his country is facing a variety of threats which need to be addressed. 

“We are facing a range of threats… it is necessary to protect all cyber, biological, chemical, and remote sensing areas,” ISNA quoted Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali as saying in a meeting on Friday with Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani. 

“Threats have grown diverse and variable, and today are most felt in the technology sector,’ Jalali explained.

Among these threats, the commander cited genetically modified products, saying measures have been taken in this regard. 

Over the past years, Iran has been increasingly afflicted with the threat of cyber-attacks by foreign countries. 

Learning from the cyber-attack by the U.S. and Israel on its nuclear facilities in 2009, what came to be known as Stuxnet virus, the country has been upgrading its cyber security capabilities in recent years, developing homegrown firewalls for its sensitive facilities, including nuclear, military, and economy sites. 

In June, Iran’s Passive Defense Organization announced plans for developing a nationwide system that would alert the country’s organizations about possible cyber-attacks, expressing hope that such a system would be developed in a short period of time.

Although the details of the plans were not revealed, two months later in August Iran confirmed it had detected and removed malicious software from its petrochemical units.

The news came after a number of Iran’s petrochemical units, including Imam Khomeini as the biggest one, stopped operating wholly or partially due to fires.
 
However, Iranian officials rejected any links between the fires and the malware they had detected. 

AK/PA