TEHRAN - The chief of Iran's Civil Defense Organization says the United States and the Israeli regime were surely behind the cyberattack that caused a temporary outage at gas stations in cities across Iran.

"From our point of view, this attack has definitely been carried out by the Americans and the Zionists," Brigadier General Gholam-Reza Jalali told a televised interview on Saturday, Press TV reported.

The attack targeted "the middleware" in the fuel delivery systems, Jalali said, describing the type of attack as very complicated and difficult to fend off.

"If the attack had taken place in the hardware layer, there would have been a need for infiltration," meaning either the company that has manufactured the software would have been responsible or a disrupting piece of equipment would have to be installed to make the attack possible, the civil defense chief stated.

The cyberattack took place on Tuesday. 

“Serious infrastructural cyber warfare has started”

Long queues that had been formed in front of gas stations in large cities were cleared up after Oil Ministry authorities dispatched teams to the petrol stations to enable offline fuel delivery.

Three hours following the attack, 30 percent of the gas stationed resumed their offline services, while 12 hours after the attack, 60 percent returned to the normal status, Jalali explained.

"Continued operation of the [country's] infrastructures is the Civil Defense Organization's redline because it affects the people's lives," he said, adding, "Serious infrastructural cyber warfare has started. We should take it seriously and rectify our areas of weakness."

Last year, as many as 1,400 drills were held to reinforce the country's cyber defense prowess, he noted, adding that so far this year 66 such maneuvers have gone underway.