Iran limits crypto trade times after politically motivated hacker attack on Nobitex
According to a large -scale cyber attack on Nobitex, the leading trading platform of the country, the Iranian authorities imposed new restrictions on domestic cryptocurrency exchanges.
According to the new guideline of the central bank, stock exchanges may now only be operated between 10:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.
This measure is a result of a severe security violation in which digital assets worth over 90 million US dollars from Nobitex were lost. The pro-Israeli hacker group Gonjeshke-also known as Predatory Sparrow-confessed to the attack, which publicly took responsibility and threatened to publish the internal data and the source code of the stock exchange.
Instead of using the stolen assets for personal purposes, the hackers are said to have “burned” the funds by sending them to inaccessible wallets, some of which contained an anti-Iranian messages of the revolutionary guard. Cyber security experts assume that the attack was politically motivated.
The blockchain companies Elliptic and Chainalysis both confirmed the destruction of the assets and linked the incident to a wider wave of cyber attacks that occur in times of tensions between Iran and Israel. Just one day before the attack on Nobitex, the same hacker group had targeted the Iranian bank Sepah.
The newly imposed trade restriction underlines the growing concern within the Iranian financial system about the security of digital assets and the geopolitical consequences of cyber wars.
