A keyboard. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Iran carried out a massive cyber-attack on the United Kingdom last December, experts have found.

According to the UK’s Sky News, the attack struck the UK post office, local government institutions, and private companies. Thousands of people had their personal information stolen during the attack.

An analysis by California-based cyber-security experts determined that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a terrorist paramilitary wing of the Islamist Iranian regime, was behind the assault, as well as a 2017 attack on the UK parliament’s network.

Sky reports that four security sources it consulted confirmed that Iran was behind the attacks.

This is not the first time Iran has been caught undertaking such actions. In 2018, members of the Mabna Institute, a group linked to the Iranian government, were indicted by the FBI for similar activities.

Lewis Henderson of the cyber-security company Glasswell told Sky of the attacks, “As we’ve seen, you can do anything… influence elections, in particular. You can start to impersonate people within that government as well and be utterly convincing.”

“The levels of trust that the global address list puts in place is completely eroded once you’ve lost that information, once it’s out there in the hands of the attackers,” he added.

“We know that they could be impersonating members of our own government and starting to alter and disrupt communications,” he said.

Emily Orton of the cyber company Darktrace agreed.

“We’re in the Wild West of hacking at the moment,” she said. “If you speak to any of the critical infrastructure providers in this country or any other, you will see that they are dealing with attacks like this pretty much on a daily basis.”