In yet another attack on digital infrastructure amidst the war in the Middle East, the data center of an Iranian bank was targetted in Tehran. According to media reports, the data center belonged to Bank Sepah, which is one of Iran’s largest public banks. It is also the bank that is reportedly used to pay salaries of Iranian military personnel, and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). There are now fears about bank and digital infrastructure being increasingly targetted as the conflict escalates across the region.
According to a report by Reuters, there are concerns surrounding retaliatory strikes by Iran against digital infrastructure in countries that are allies of the US or Israel. “Following their failed campaign, the terrorist U.S. army and cruel Zionist regime (Israel) have targeted one of the country’s banks,” state media quoted Ebrahim Zolfaqari, a spokesperson for Tehran’s Khatam al-Anbiya military command headquarters as saying. “With this illegitimate and uncommon action, the enemy is forcing our hand to target economic centres and banks linked to the U.S. and Zionist regime in the region,” he added. He further warned that “people of the region should not be within a one-kilometre radius of banks”.
This has now prompted many international banks to evacuate their offices across the Middle East. According to a report by Reuters, Citigroup and Standard Chartered Banks have begun evacuating their Dubai offices, advising employees to work from home instead. Meanwhile, HSBC has closed all branches in Qatar until further notice citing safety issues.
Al Jazeera reported that the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency released a list of offices and infrastructure run by top US companies with Israeli links whose technology has been used for military applications, describing them as “Iran’s new targets”. The companies include Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle, and the listed offices and infrastructure for cloud-based services are located in multiple Israeli cities, as well as in some Gulf countries.
This is not the first time data centers have been targeted in this war. Readers would recall that as many as three AWS data centers were impacted by bomb strikes earlier this month. On Sunday, March 1, power was temporarily shut down at an Amazon data center in the UAE, after it was “impacted by objects that struck the data center.” There were reports of “fire and sparks” at the facility.
Then on March 2, two more AWS data centers were targeted – one in the UAE, and another in Bahrain. This time Amazon clearly attributed the damage to drone strikes. “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” said Amazon in an update on its AWS Health Dashboard. It also advised customers to move their workloads to other regions, and therein lies the potential for a wider discussion on data localization and sovereignty, in case of war or similar crises.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that an Iran-linked hacker group launched a cyberattack on Stryker, one of the world’s largest medical device companies, crippling its global operations. “Handala, a hacking persona with documented ties to Tehran, said it carried out the attack in retaliation for the killing of more than 170 people, most of them schoolgirls, in a strike on a school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on the first day of the US-Israeli military war against Iran,” reported Al Jazeera.