“The cyber maneuvers bylaw has been prepared and will be circulated among the relevant organizations in a bid to improve and materialize the civil defense objectives in the field of cyber,” Jalali said on Saturday, addressing a seminar of civil defense director-generals of different Iranian provinces.
He noted the Civil Defense Organization also plans to set regulations in the near future for the country’s vital infrastructures in a bid to achieve complete safety in the cyber field.
“Vital infrastructures fall within the first layer of the information technology and if they stop functioning, it will cause danger at national security level,” he added.
In the last few years, various Iranian industrial, nuclear and government bodies have come under growing cyber attacks, widely believed to be designed and staged by the US and Israel.
Wide-scale cyber attacks on Iranian facilities started in 2010 after the US and Israel tried to disrupt the operation of Iran's nuclear facilities through a worm which later came to be known as Stuxnet.
US intelligence officials revealed in April 2012 that the Stuxnet malware was not only designed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program, but was part of a wider campaign directed from Israel that included the assassination of the country's nuclear scientists.
Stuxnet, first identified by the Iranian officials in June 2010, is a malware designed to infect computers using a control system favored by industries that manage water supplies, oil rigs, and power plants.
In July 2010, media reports claimed that Stuxnet had targeted industrial computers around the globe, with Iran being the main target of the attack. They said the country's Bushehr nuclear power plant was at the center of the cyber attack.
Iranian experts, however, detected the worm in time, averting any damage to the country's industrial sites and resources.
In response to such attacks, Iran launched cyber defense headquarters tasked with preventing computer worms from breaking into or stealing data from the country’s maximum security networks, including nuclear facilities, power plants, data centers, and banks.