The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran said on Friday that a ship carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) suffered “a massive explosion” and caught fire east of the Strait of Hormuz after hitting a naval mine. According to the Iranian agency Fars, which cited the IRGC Navy’s press office, the vessel reportedly ignored warnings and attempted to cross via an unauthorized and dangerous route south of the strait.
In the same set of statements, the Fars also attributed to IRGC command a rhetoric of escalation. The commander-in-chief Ahmad Vahidi stated that the “enemy” should learn from “successive defeats” and that “greater lessons” would be forthcoming, in a veiled reference to the United States, adding that “the slightest aggression against Tehran will be answered with horrific and painful blows.”
Hours later, the IRGC announced it had attacked a U.S. early-warning radar system in Bahrain. According to the AFP, fighters of the Iranian Aerospace Force would have attacked and destroyed the radar on the island, in retaliation for the American attack on a telecommunications tower in Sirik, a port city in southern Iran. To date, there was no independent confirmation of the bombardment by Manama or Washington, according to the agency.
Parallel to the rising tensions in the Gulf, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Iran has been intensifying actions in cyberspace with effects in the physical world, with recent episodes involving, among other targets, tanker networks and civilian infrastructure, according to experts and officials consulted by the newspaper.
Since the Northern Hemisphere summer, cases of hacker attacks against water facilities in the U.S. Midwest, tanker ships bound for Texas and hundreds of refrigerators in supermarkets have been recorded and raised suspicions of Tehran’s involvement, according to the WSJ. Once seen as a “second-line” threat, Iran would be expanding targets and methods by combining data-deletion techniques and intrusions into programmable logic controllers – used to automate industrial processes.
American and Israeli authorities warned, according to the newspaper, about the actions of groups associated with Iran, such as CyberAv3ngers, and note that the American agency CISA has already linked the group to attacks against Unitronics systems.
