Iran appears to have conducted a significant cyberattack against a U.S. company, a first since the war started

[SamuelTheThird]

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-appears-conducted-significant-cyberattack-us-company-first-war-st-rcna263084

[hlthe2b]

1. Welcome, SamuelTheThird... Just a request on behalf of other DUers...

If you could please post a short summary (up to three or four paragraphs) excerpt, everyone would be very very grateful. Posts with just links are not very helpful, especially in the morning when a lot of people want to skim the news before leaving for work and the key question here is WHAT COMPANY? (i.e., Stryker, a major Minnesota health corporation).

Here is an example:

An Iran-linked hacker group has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on a medical tech company in what appears to be the first significant instance of Iran’s hacking an American company since the start of the war between the countries.

The company, Stryker, which is headquartered in Michigan, produces a range of medical equipment and technology.

Historically, Iran has conducted some of the most infamous “wiper” cyberattacks on national enemies, aiming to simply erase all data on computers’ networks. Victims include Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, in 2012, and the Sands Casino in 2014.

Since the war started, some established hacker groups sympathetic to Iranian leadership have claimed minor attacks, but most have been relegated to briefly altering the appearance of a website, and none have appeared to have had major impact. Some tech and cybersecurity companies, including Google, and the email cybersecurity company Proofpoint have told NBC News that they have largely seen Iran’s hackers conducting espionage related to the war.

[Irish_Dem]

2. Trump is getting a lesson in asymmetrical warfare?

[AltairIV]

3. He has absolutely no idea what that means.

[Irish_Dem]

5. The only thing he wants to know is how soon can he steal the oil, gold, land.

And how many people can he kill in the process.
He likes that part.

The rest has no meaning for him whatsoever.

[Vinca]

4. This is the kind of thing Iran can do create chaos in this country. What if they take down a power grid?

[OC375]

6. We put them back in the 1800's as well

The back and forth can go on for a while. Everyone can be all creative and dark and foreboding, but we haven’t gone Gaza on Tehran yet either, so people are still staying relatively sane thus far.

[Johnny2X2X]

7. A good friend is an engineer at Stryker in Michigan

Last edited Thu Mar 12, 2026, 10:59 AM - Edit history (1)

Crazy story, he had a huge product launch that was supposed to occur yesterday, something he had been working on for a year or more with a team of several dozen other engineers. He woke up at 3:30 am and thought he'd check something quick and when he went to wake his work computer up, he got the blue screen of death. he figured he'd deal with it in the morning. The morning was the same and then his work phone was wiped too. No way to communicate with work at all, he's been getting texts on his personal phone from a manager. Site is shut down, they're dead in the water.

This is a high tech company that makes a variety of medical devices and surgical kits. They ship thousands of vital packages every day and now that is 0. Some of the surgical kits they make are JIT delivery because of the materials in them, there are probably surgeries that are being postponed already because of this attack.

This is a $130 Billion company just stopped from functioning at all because of this. $millions in life saving devices not being shipped daily. Doctors and patients not knowing what to do. Surgeons maybe having to use older and less accurate or efficient surgical tools and instruments. It's a disaster and this company could be down for weeks or months.

[uncle ray]

8. there could be some serious knock on effects from this too.

background: i "was" an engineer at a 2nd tier med device manufacturer that supplied product to OEMs such as Stryker. we had a vendor portal at every major customer, where the hundreds or thousands of suppliers can log onto their network and upload and download all kinds of file types. logons to their VPNs were passed around freely, i could log into supplier portals from my home computers or mobile devlces. as far as i know, similar connections exist to the FDA for submitting regulatory filings. your engineer friend would likely know if this is true. anyway, this is a possible entry point, and it's possible this malware could be spreading to sub-tier suppliers or gov't servers via these "secure" connections.

[Johnny2X2X]

9. It was a hack of the Microsoft Device Management tool

Microsoft Intune. It's a cloud based application IT uses to manage all of a company's devices. And remotely wiping devices is a standard function as when someone loses a device, it needs to be wiped, or if an employee is terminated or passes away, their devices must be remotely wiped. Someone hacked an administrator. Maybe phishing, maybe straight hack, not sure. But they were able to bypass or duplicate two factor authentication and have administrator rights. So they wiped 200,000 phones, laptops, and servers at once, after extracting 50 TB of data, and then they vandalized the Intune app with their hacker logo.

Just an incredible breach by a team that knows what they are doing.

[SamuelTheThird]

10. This needs more coverage

People should know the consequences of all this