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A lot of organizational leaders woke up today worried about increased risks of cyberattacks as the Iranian conflict continues. That fear is natural. But the most successful leaders and security teams won’t let that fear paralyze them. They’ll channel it into action: reviewing their incident response plan, ensuring they have the right solutions in place to identify and respond quickly to threats, and asking whether the ransomware groups now energized by this conflict are sanctioned entities. Because if they are, paying the ransom is not only inadvisable. It may be illegal.
Iran’s Cyber Playbook and Why It’s Different
Iran is one of the most capable and malicious cyber actors in the world. It doesn’t need to match Russia or China to be dangerous. Tehran’s long track record of using cyber operations to retaliate makes the threat it poses clear enough.
When a casino owner said things in the media it didn’t like, Iran conducted a destructive data-wiping attack against his networks. After the death of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, proxies immediately defaced US websites while Iran used the event as a long-term catalyst for cyber operations, including election interference attempts. When Albania hosted an Iranian dissident group, Iran launched a devastating cyberattack on Albanian government networks, destroying data and disrupting critical services. During the recent Gaza conflict, Iranian targeted operational technology equipment at US and Israeli water facilities.
This long list shows that Iran doesn’t only target military or government institutions. Tehran targets whoever it is angry at, and its memory is long.
What makes the current threat environment particularly complex is Iran’s operational model. Their cyber activity typically blends state-sponsored operations, opportunistic criminal groups, and hacktivist organizations, some of which are genuine independent actors, and some of which are Iranian state constructs operating with plausible deniability. When an attack occurs, it may take days or weeks to confirm Iranian attribution. This is time during which the victim is already deciding whether and how to respond.
What Attackers Are Actually Doing Right Now
The current wave of Iranian-linked activity includes DDoS campaigns flooding regional websites, ransomware calls to action offering discounted or free tools to affiliates willing to attack at will, and (perhaps most concerning) a deliberate shift to stealth mode Groups that previously publicized victims on data leak sites have gone dark. No public claims, no countdown clocks, and minimal communications. They’re still active. They’re just harder to track.
Iranian groups have also demonstrated a willingness to weaponize ransomware as a destruction tool by deploying encryptors—even using ones they know are broken—simply to cause damage. That’s a fundamentally different threat model than financial-based ransomware, and it demands a fundamentally different defensive posture. You cannot negotiate your way out of an attack that was never designed to end in negotiation. Sicari, BQT Lock, and Pay2Key are among the groups with Iranian ties or sympathies actively tracked right now.
When Paying a Ransom Violates the Law
Here’s where the threat becomes uniquely dangerous for organizations that get hit: if the ransomware group is a sanctioned entity (and several Iranian-nexus groups are), paying the ransom may violate US economic sanctions laws. A full list of the US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions is available here.
And, while OFAC attempts to work with victims, the fact remains that incident responders have watched organizations face an impossible situation: backups destroyed, data encrypted, and no legal path to payment because the attacker OFAC sanctions list. In at least one documented case, an organization had no viable recovery option and was forced to close. Not because they lacked cyber insurance or IT resources, but because paying a sanctioned entity would have created legal liability worse than the attack itself.
That reality changes the calculus on ransomware defense entirely. Against Iranian-nexus actors, prevention or early containment may be the only viable options.
What to Do Before the Attack Arrives
Take it from me: don’t wait for the attack to test your readiness.
Pull your incident response plan out right now. Verify that it is current. Confirm that you have an offline copy – in fact consider making it only available offline so attackers cannot review your policy and use it against you in negotiations. Enable multifactor authentication on all your accounts and patch lingering vulnerabilities now if you have not done so already.
Make sure you have solutions in place that can detect and disrupt malicious behaviors early, not just alert you after the damage is done. And check that your backups are intact, tested, and actually recoverable, because ransomware attackers consistently delete backups as part of their campaigns. Just when I thought I’d seen everything, in our recent webinar, we discussed a case where the attacker was so savvy that they canceled the victim’s backup subscriptions a month before deploying ransomware, timed specifically to eliminate recovery options before the victim realized anything was wrong. That’s terrifying.
Make sure your legal counsel, communications team, and business leadership are part of the response plan, not just your IT department. Iranian operations increasingly blend actual attacks with disinformation campaigns designed to create confusion and amplify chaos. Your PR team needs to know what the response looks like before that scenario plays out in real time.
And recognize that whether the attack comes from Iran directly, a proxy group, or an opportunistic criminal taking advantage of the chaos, the tactics are the same ones that have been working reliably for years: legitimate credentials, living-off-the-land tools, low-severity alerts that never get investigated, and exfiltration before encryption.
You don’t need to attribute the attack to respond to it. You just need to stop it.
Want to go deeper? Listen to our panel of cybersecurity experts, including a former FBI Cyber Division Deputy Assistant Director, for a briefing on what to expect and how to prepare.
Iran’s Next Move: What the Conflict Means for Cybersecurity Teams
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