⁠Iran Poised for a Digital Counterstrike: A Practical Guide to Reduce Your Exposure

Iran will likely respond to U.S. strikes on its nuclear facilities by launching swift, low-cost cyberattacks against U.S. government agencies and private-sector companies.

As the crisis in the Middle East intensifies, especially following the US attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, the risk of retaliatory cyber operations from Iranian state-sponsored actors has grown significantly. Offensive cyber capabilities have been fully incorporated into Iran’s military doctrine for long and they are now regarded as a strategic tool used to respond to foreign pressures, assert regional influence, and deter adversaries. 

Rather than limiting its operations to military or government entities, Iran has demonstrated a clear willingness to target a broad spectrum of civilian and private-sector organizations. As a result, we believe that any major U.S. company — particularly those in sensitive industries like telecom, infrastructure, healthcare, manufacturing, or financial services — could be at risk of becoming a target.

Iranian cyber units operate through a constellation of threat groups affiliated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Ministry of Intelligence — such as APT33, APT34, and MuddyWater. In recent years, Iran’s offensive cyber strategy has included both direct attacks on infrastructure and more covert efforts to maintain persistent access inside Western networks. 

These actors routinely exploit known vulnerabilities, often within days of public disclosure. For example, diverse FortiOS vulnerabilities were heavily exploited in 2023 and 2024 to penetrate edge devices, while ProxyShell and Log4Shell vulnerabilities continued to be targeted long after initial patches were issued.

Recent incidents reflect Iran’s increasing focus on critical sectors and its willingness to escalate. In October 2023, Iranian actors were observed actively trying to compromise critical infrastructures in sectors such as healthcare, IT, government, energy and engineering - obtaining initial access through brute force attacks, then leveraging Windows ZeroLogon flaw for privilege escalation. In November, the CyberAv3ngers group explored PLC vulnerabilities on ChatGPT, consequently breaking into water plants in the US. A month later, an APT34 campaign sought to compromise US hospital systems through targeted phishing and supply chain attacks. In the meantime, the Iranian state actor Lemon Sandstorm has also widely exploited various edge vulnerabilities (CheckPoint, Ivanti NetScaler, Palo Alto, F5 Big-IP), sometimes collaborating with major ransomware groups. 

In light of these developments, American corporations must recognize that they are entering a phase of significantly elevated cyber risk. Iranian state-sponsored groups have repeatedly demonstrated their intent and capability to retaliate in the cyber domain — often through persistent, multi-stage campaigns that quietly establish access long before any disruption occurs. The threat is not limited to data theft or temporary downtime; it includes long-term degradation of system integrity, operational paralysis, and reputational damage. 

Traditional security monitoring and perimeter defenses are insufficient against an adversary that is adaptive, patient, and willing to exploit every available foothold. To counter this evolving threat, organizations must adopt a proactive and dynamic defense posture - and modern CTEM platforms like Zafran are essential in this context. With Zafran, you will be able to continuously track your level of exposure to Iranian groups, get visibility into exploitable attack paths, mitigate risks while leveraging your current security tools, and prioritize remediation based on the likelihood and impact of exploitation. 
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Mitigation recommendations against the Iranian cyber threats

1. Define an “Iranian Exposure Tracker” inside your CTEM platform, continuously monitoring your level of exposure to CVEs commonly exploited by Iranian threat groups.
2. Add an “Iranian Exposure Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR)” CTEM metric.
3. Use your CTEM platform to leverage your current security tools and apply detection and protection rules to mitigate CVEs used by Iranian actors.
4. Accelerate edge-device patching, and apply firmware and software updates to VPNs, firewalls, ADCs (Ivanti, Fortinet, Citrix, Palo Alto, F5) within 48 hours of release.
5. Issue configuration jobs with your CTEM console that both patch and execute post-upgrade actions: session revocation, credential rotation, logging to remote syslog.
6. Configure external attack-surface scanners to often refresh for appliances on ports most often targeted in Iranian campaigns - 443, 8443, 4500, 8888.
7. Mandate phishing-resistant MFA, require hardware keys or certificate-based authentication for all privileged accounts (VPN, cloud, email, OT gateways).
8. Monitor for credential theft & abuse - Alert on newly created domain accounts or sudden role changes.
9. Conduct continuous threat hunting for Iranian IOCs.

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Appendix A 

Vulnerabilities Commonly Exploited by Iranian Threat Groups 

• CVE-2024-30088 – Windows Kernel (Win32k) privilege escalation
• CVE-2024-3400 – Palo Alto PAN-OS / GlobalProtect command-injection RCE
• CVE-2024-24919 – Check Point Security Gateway VPN information-disclosure
• CVE-2024-21887 – Ivanti Connect Secure command-injection RCE
• CVE-2023-46805 – Ivanti Connect Secure authentication bypass
• CVE-2023-3519 – Citrix NetScaler ADC / Gateway unauthenticated RCE
• CVE-2023-27350 – PaperCut MF/NG pre-auth RCE
• CVE-2023-38831 – WinRAR archive-processing code execution
• CVE-2022-47966 – Zoho ManageEngine pre-auth RCE
• CVE-2022-42475 – Fortinet FortiOS SSL-VPN heap-overflow RCE
• CVE-2022-1388 – F5 BIG-IP iControl REST authentication-bypass / RCE
• CVE-2021-34473 – Microsoft Exchange ProxyShell remote code execution
• CVE-2021-34523 – Microsoft Exchange ProxyShell privilege escalation
• CVE-2021-31207 – Microsoft Exchange ProxyShell post-auth RCE
• CVE-2021-44228 – Apache Log4j (Log4Shell) RCE
• CVE-2022-30190 – Microsoft MSDT (Follina) RCE
• CVE-2022-26134 – Atlassian Confluence OGNL-injection RCE
• CVE-2022-47986 – IBM Aspera Faspex remote code execution
• CVE-2020-1472 – Netlogon (ZeroLogon) privilege escalation
• CVE-2019-19781 – Citrix ADC / Gateway directory-traversal RCE
• CVE-2019-11510 – Pulse Secure VPN arbitrary file read
• CVE-2018-13379 – Fortinet SSL-VPN path-traversal RCE
• ‍CVE-2017-11774 – Microsoft Outlook EWS rule-injection RCE

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Appendix B

Top MITRE TTPs Used by Iranian Threat Groups

• T1566.001 — Spearphishing Attachment
• T1190 — Exploit Public-Facing Application
• T1078 — Valid Accounts
• T1059.001 — Command & Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell
• T1071.001 — Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols
• T1003.001 — OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory
• T1087.002 — Account Discovery: Domain Account
• T1047 — Windows Management Instrumentation
• T1053.005 — Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task
• T1105 — Ingress Tool Transfer