Iran is going offline to prevent purported Israeli cyberattacks
In a purported attempt to limit Israel's ability to wage cyberwarfare, Iran has begun throttling its civilians' access to the internet and plans to disconnect entirely from the global internet by Tuesday night.
Fateme Mohajerani, a government spokesperson, said during a recent television broadcast that the speed reduction was "temporary, targeted, and controlled, aimed at countering cyberattacks," according to machine translation.
The announcements come amidst the escalating war between Iran and Israel, which broke out after Israel attacked the country on June 12th, and a rise in reported internet outages. Civilians have claimed that they've been unable to access basic but critical telecommunications services, such as messaging apps, maps, and sometimes the internet itself. Cloudflare reported that two major Iranian cellular carriers effectively went offline on Tuesday, and The New York Times reports that even VPNs, which Iranians frequently use to access banned sites like Facebook and Instagram, have become increasingly harder to access.
Furthermore, the Iranian government is urging citizens to delete WhatsApp - one of the country's most popular messaging platforms - claimin …