DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A new report by a cybersecurity firm is warning that a suspected government-backed group of hackers in Iran are targeting the aviation and petrochemical industries in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and South Korea.
FireEye said Wednesday the group it calls APT33 used phishing email attacks with fake job opportunities to gain access to affected companies.
Stuart Davis, a director at a FireEye subsidiary, told The Associated Press that the hackers had access from "four to six months" inside those companies affected. He says they also left malware behind that could have allowed hackers to destroy the computers they infected.
Davis says the time the hackers worked, as well as bits of Farsi in the code and other details leads them to suspect they worked in Iran, likely for the government.