Reports Say Passport Control System Hacked At Tehran Airport

The passport control system at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport was reportedly hacked on Saturday, stranding passengers for a couple of hours.

The spokesman of the airport, Javad Salehi, however, rejected the reports of a cyberattack, saying the incident that created long queues of passengers at the airport’s terminals was caused by a technical glitch.

Emphasizing that penetrating the system was impossible, he said the technical issue was due to a problem between the online and offline servers of the system.

Salehi claimed the airport system is not connected to the Internet so it cannot be attacked or hacked, saying the system is based on a very secure intranet.

Colonel Mohammad Haydari, the manager of the airport’s Aerial Border Control, said the incident caused a brief delay of about 15 minutes in flights.

Also on Saturday, an Iran Air jetliner, which departed from Tehran for the Iraqi city of Najaf, had to make an emergency landing in the central city of Esfahan due to a technical failure. It was the third such incident of the airliner in about a week.

On Thursday, a largescale cyberattack by an Iranian hacktivist group calling itself ‘Uprising till Overthrow' targeted over 5,000 surveillance cameras and 150 websites and online services of Tehran Municipality, deactivating the cameras and putting anti-regime content on the websites.