March 11, 2019

Citrix suspects Iranian hackers behind their big data breach

The incident has been identified as a part of a cyber espionage campaign targeting government, military, industrial and financial organizations.

Software provider Citrix have informed customers of a big data breach within their systems after the FBI conducted a thorough investigation last Friday. This incident, Citrix suspect, was orchestrated by Iranian hackers to target government agencies, military organizations, industrial, financial and large scale enterprises.

Citrix say that hackers gained access to their system and stole about 6 terabytes of data. They say that after the initial round of inspection, some more details have surfaced which direct towards the source of these attacks.

According to the investigations led by the FBI, Citrix say that the perpetrator of this attack is an Iranian government-linked hacking group called IRIDIUM. They further added that as a result of this attack, sensitive data files including e-mail correspondence, files and other services used for project management were stolen.

Explaining the data breach, Citrix claim that the perpetrators might have gained entry into their network at least 10 years ago and since then had been lurking inside the system. They claim that in spite of having an intruder into their system, their IT task force could not detect the same for such a long time.

Industry experts claim that this event is unfortunate because the company, being a security and software facilitator, could not detect malice within their network. It will be interesting to see how Citrix deals with this incident and whether they follow the same footsteps as Visma did after they faced a cyber attack from China.