WASHINGTON: Iran’s government is backing a hacker group responsible for recent ransomware attacks on targets in the United States and Australia, the US cybersecurity agency said on Wednesday.

“The Iranian government-sponsored APT actors are actively targeting a broad range of victims across multiple US critical infrastructure sectors, including the Transportation Sector and the Healthcare and Public Health Sector,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in an alert.

It said that experts in the FBI, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, and Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre had jointly reached the conclusion on Tehran’s support for the “APT” group, or “advanced persistent threat,” a designation often given to state-backed hackers.

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2021