Qatar, Iran Sign Cooperation Deals During Raisi Visit

Reuters reported last week that a US-Iranian deal is taking shape in Vienna after months of indirect talks to revive a pact Washington abandoned in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump.

"The United States must prove its will to lift major sanctions," Raisi said in a joint news conference with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani in Doha.

"To reach an agreement, guarantees are necessary for negotiations and nuclear issues."

The draft text of the agreement also alluded to other issues, including unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian funds in South Korean banks, and the release of Western prisoners held in Iran.

"Aggression is bound to fail. Resistance has brought results and none of the regional issues have a military solution," Raisi said.

Raisi was more cautious than Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh, who said earlier that the Vienna negotiations had made "significant progress".

Khatibzadeh also said that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" in the Vienna talks. "The remaining issues are the hardest," he told a weekly press briefing.

Khatibzadeh said that Iran’s top security body, the Supreme National Security Council, handles the Vienna talks. It reports directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Reporting by Reuters

The American-Israeli software and hardware security company said in a comprehensive technical analysis published on February18 that the recent wave of attacks that caused major disruptions to public services are far from minor website defacements.

The report provided in-depth breakdowns for some of the attacks, including the targeted hack of the state broadcaster (IRIB) in late January, saying the attackers’ aim was also to disrupt the IRIB’s programs, with the damage to the TV and radio networks possibly more serious than officially reported.

Several television and radio channels of the state broadcaster were hacked on January 27 with photos of leaders of an opposition group briefly aired. The image of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, leaders of the Albania-based opposition Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), were broadcast for around 10 seconds with audio footage from one of their speeches in the background.

After the picture of the MEK leaders, the video showed a photo of Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei with a red cross on it, as an off-camera voice said, “Death to Khamenei.” Khamenei was badly injured in 1981 in one of a series of bombings attributed to the MEK.

Check Point research team probed the cyberattack and was able to retrieve the files and forensic evidence from publicly available resources, finding malicious executables whose purpose was to air the protest message, as well as evidence that a wiper malware was used.

The security firm provided a technical analysis of the tools used in the attack, as well as the attackers’ tactics, identifying malware that takes screenshots of the victims’ screens, several custom-made backdoors, and related batch scripts and configuration files used to install and configure the malicious executables.

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Check Point also gave a detailed report about other major cyber-attacks such as an attack that hit the Iranian national railway and cargo services in July 2021. The attack caused “unprecedented disruptions” to the country’s trains, a day before media outlets reported that the website of Iran’s Roads Ministry, in charge of transportation, was taken down in a ‘cyber disruption’, preventing access to their official portal and sub-services.

A message was also displayed on the train schedule boards referred perplexed passengers to the Supreme Leader’s office phone number.

A group called ‘Predatory Sparrow’ claimed responsibility for the attacks, whose tools and tactics were used in similar operations against private companies in Syria by an anti-regime group called Indra.

In August 2021, the hacktivist group Tapandegan (Palpitations), previously known for hacking and displaying protest messages on the electronic flight arrival and departure boards in Mashhad and Tabriz international airports in 2018, released security camera footage from Tehran's Evin Prison, where many political prisoners are held. Tapandegan said the images had been acquired by hackers called Edalat-e Ali (Ali's Justice) and were being circulated to draw attention to human rights violations, particularly against political prisoners.

In October 2021, all gas stations in Iran were paralyzed by an attack that disrupted the electronic payment process, leading to extremely long queues for two days that prevented customers from paying with the government-issued electronic cards used to purchase subsidized fuel. When the card was swiped for payment, the supreme leader’s office phone number appeared on the screen. Iranian officials claimed that foreign actors, such as Israel and the US, were behind the attack. However, Predatory Sparrow claimed responsibility for this attack as well.

On February 1, the web-based streaming platform of IRIB, Telewebion, was hijacked yet again to broadcast protest messages urging citizens to rebel and stating that “the regime’s foundations are rattling” in the middle of a live broadcast of the Iran-UAE soccer match.

Recently, on February 7, 2022, the Edalat-e Ali group released footage from closed-circuit cameras in another Iranian prison, Ghezel Hesar.

Check Point says it is still not clear how the attackers gained initial access to these networks that are “completely isolated, are equipped with acceptable security protocols and are not accessible via the Internet”.

It concluded that “the actor may have many capabilities that have yet to be explored. On the one hand, the attackers managed to pull off a complicated operation to bypass security systems and network segmentation, penetrate the broadcaster’s networks, produce and run the malicious tools that heavily rely on internal knowledge of the broadcasting software used by victims, all while staying under the radar during the reconnaissance and initial intrusion stages”.

Check Point also concluded that “the attackers’ tools are of relatively low quality and sophistication and are launched by clumsy and sometimes buggy 3-line batch scripts”, which supports their “theory that the attackers might have had help from insiders or indicate a yet unknown collaboration between different groups with different skills”.

In a letter to the Customs Administration released to media on Monday, the Health Ministry said the vaccines were from "unauthorized sources" without mentioning they were made in the US. But Fars news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard claimed the vaccines were returned because the were US-made.

The Biden Administration last year donated about 60 million doses of AstraZeneca to other countries because they were never used in the US.

According to the document the health ministry ordered the customs administration to return the last consignment back to Poland.

The Polish embassy in Tehran said in October that Poland was donating a million AstraZeneca COVID-19 shots to the Islamic Republic.

AstraZeneca is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with its headquarters at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, England.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had banned the purchase of US and British-made vaccinesin January 2021, saying that "Importing vaccines made in the US or the UK is prohibited. They are completely untrustworthy. It is not unlikely that they would want to contaminate other nations… French vaccines are not trustworthy either”.

Health authorities, who have said the country is in its sixth wave of the pandemic, warn the figures are expected to increase exponentially during the next two months.

President Ebrahim Raisi has rejected proposals for a nationwide shutdown.

Raeisi arrived in Doha on Monday to hold high-level talks with Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and is also scheduled to address the GECF summit on Tuesday.

Several ministers and officials are accompanying Raisi and several agreements and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) are to be signed during his two-day visit. Iran and Qatar share the world’s largest gas-field, with the Iranian part known as South Pars and Qatar’s as North Dome.

Iran’s roads and transport minister, Rostam Ghasemi, told the state broadcaster that four agreements will be signed between the two countries, the most important of which is about a plan to connect Iran and Qatar via an underwater tunnel.

According to Ghasemi, two of the other agreements are about shipping and boosting maritime trade, and the fourth relates to improving air travel.

The trip could also be an opportunity for Qatar to discuss Iran’s nuclear negotiations with world powers and the issue of direct talks with the United States. Iran has rejected any mediation on the issue.

Washington is also liaising with energy-producing states and firms over possible diversion of supplies to Europe should Russia invade Ukraine. Moscow supplies one-third of Europe’s natural gas and might stop winter deliveries if sanctioned by the US or western Europe over any action in Ukraine.

The crash happened in a residential area in the center of Tabriz, a city of 1.6 million residents. The third person killed was a passerby in the area.

The accident was followed by a huge fire in central Tabriz, which was put out following the intervention of the firefighters.

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According to the commander of the Tabriz air base, General Reza Yousefi, the jet had been used for training while it suffered a technical problem on its final flight. He said that due to the technical problem “pilots could not reach the runway”.

Yousefi claimed that the pilots could have used the ejection system, but they refused to do it and “sacrificed themselves” to guide the jet to the stadium and not crash into a populated area “to keep people safe”.

The jet, however, initially hit the ground of a school according to local reports before crashing into the stadium but the school was closed, and no one was injured or killed there.

Iran’s air force has an assortment of US-made military aircraft purchased before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which are not considered in optimal condition as decades of Western sanctions have made it hard to maintain the aging fleet.