Iran Is Increasing Its Military and Cyber Activity, Report Says – By Patrick Tucker (Nextgov) / May 15 2020
After a big drop in April, Iran’s conventional military activity is up. Cyber operations never slowed down.
Few countries were hit as hard by the COVID-19 pandemic as Iran, which has seen more than 114,000 confirmed cases. But in recent weeks, open-source intelligence gleaned from Persian- and Arabic-language sources, as well as commercially available location data from mobile devices, suggests that Iranian military activity did not drop off as severely as civilian activity, according to data analytics company Babel Street. Both types of activity picked back up in May, and Iran’s support for offensive cyber operations and proxy forces in Yemen and Iraq didn’t show any signs of waning at all.
Babel Street’s analysis drew on commercial telemetry data, or CTD, gleaned from things like apps that collect users’ locations. They compared the data year-on-year in March, April, and May at facilities in Bushehr and the Strait-of-Hormuz port of Bandar Abbas, including air bases, naval bases, and the Bushehr nuclear facility.
In a report released Thursday and obtained exclusively by Defense One, they found that civilian activity dropped more than 90% during parts of March and April, as measured from data collected at the Tehran Grand Bazaar and elsewhere. Military activity dropped 30% to 50% compared to last year.
“Unlike the example from Tehran Grand Bazaar, activity never appears to have fallen below 25% of 2019 levels, even during peak [COVID-19] countermeasures from 20 March to 17 April,” they write.
Activity rose in the two weeks preceding May 11, they say.
Continue to article: https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2020/05/iran-increasing-its-military-and-cyber-activity-report-says/165435/
