The near-total internet blackout imposed by the Iranian government starting January 8, reportedly due to a crackdown on protesters, may offer a rare opportunity to SOC staffers and other cybersecurity analysts, briefly allowing all government traffic sources to be identified and digitally fingerprinted, a massive help in tracking Iranian state actors.
Among global malicious state actors, Iran is near the top, behind China, Russia and North Korea, which suggests that this kind of intel on Iranian systems might prove useful.
One cybersecurity vendor CEO argues that it is indeed a potential threat intel goldmine.
In an almost-total internet blackout, “the attack surface available to state hackers shrinks. They can no longer hide in the noise of millions of residential IPs. They are forced to route their attacks through the few remaining whitelisted pipes, which are exactly those boring government agencies such as Agriculture, Energy, Universities,” said Kaveh Ranjbar, CEO of Whisper Security. “Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups routinely co-opt benign government infrastructure to launch attacks because it looks clean. When the rest of the country is dark, those boring servers become the only available launchpads. A connection from the Ministry of Agriculture might not be a farmer. It’s likely a tunnel for a state actor who needs an exit node.”
Ranjbar said the removal of the traffic from millions of routine Iranian business and residential users allows a powerful visibility into Iranian government traffic patterns, thereby allowing SOCs to flag those sources.
“For a CISO, the calculus is simple: User traffic is zero. If Amazon or a bank sees traffic from Tehran during a blackout, it is not a customer buying books or checking a balance. It is not a remote employee. [All] of the traffic is machine-generated and state-sanctioned. Even if it’s just a misconfigured cron job at the Ministry of Water, it is an anomaly. But more often, it is scanning, probing, or reconnaissance,” Ranjbar said.
“You don’t need a list of malicious agencies,” he observed. “You need to know that the entire visible IP space of Iran is currently a privileged enclave. If a server is allowed to speak to the outside world while 80 million citizens are silenced, that server is, by definition, an asset of the state. In a zero-trust environment, that makes it a high-confidence Indicator of Compromise (IoC) if it touches your network.”
Analysts and consultants, however, were reserved about the approach, but pointed out that, on an ROI basis, it will typically require minimal effort to capture that data during the blackout, so it can’t hurt much to do so.
“I don’t think there’s any downside to capturing it,” said Robert Kramer, vice president/principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
Data might be of limited value
But, Kramer and other experts said, the nature of state actors today may make that captured data of limited value.
State actors for those four countries are among the most sophisticated, experienced, and best-financed attackers anywhere. One of their top skills is not only knowing how to cover their tracks, but how to create false logs and other deceptions to make the attack look like it is being launched from anywhere other than its true source. In short, if the logs point to the attack coming from China, a CISO knows that the attack almost certainly wasn’t launched by China.
Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said that he sees some of the potential value, but added that it is limited.
In this kind of blackout, “the few packets that escape become disproportionately meaningful. You’re looking at whitelisted ASNs, state-controlled telecoms and government-operated services. That residual traffic helps map adversary digital infrastructure with surprising clarity. The presence of DNS queries, passive malware beacons, or control-plane BGP signals during a blackout gives analysts a blueprint of national priorities.” Gogia said.
But, he stressed, that’s where the value may stop. “Residual traffic does not readily convert into block rules or SIEM logic. It does not hand you command-and-control servers on a silver platter. Most of it is either benign or diagnostic. And unless correlated with strong behavioral signals, it rarely survives the trip from strategic context to operational action,” he said.
“Yes, you might find an Iranian IP that kept chattering when no one else could. But was it a threat actor’s box, or just a government website? Without high-confidence enrichment, it’s guesswork. Worse, if that same IP goes back to hosting payroll services a week later, your SOC is stuck chasing shadows. That’s why this intelligence is best used for threat modelling, not triage.”
Gogia added that the captured data is also likely to expire relatively quickly.
“Routing anomalies and observable proxies are equally unstable. During partial shutdowns, traffic might reroute through unexpected neighbors or temporarily migrate to backup ISPs,” he noted. “A sharp analyst might catch an Iranian subnet using a German transit point during a blackout. But once service restores, that path disappears. If you treated it as a long-term IoC, it would quickly become a dead end.”
Setting aside deliberate deception, there is also a lot of legitimate traffic coming from Iranian government agencies, Matthew Stern, CEO at CNC Intelligence, pointed out.
“This may offer short-term insight into routing behavior, protocol usage, and infrastructure dependencies that Iranian state-linked operators may later reuse. However, this should not be overstated,” Stern said. “Government traffic is not inherently malicious and sophisticated Iranian cyber actors frequently operate through foreign infrastructure, compromised hosts, and third-party services outside Iran, which significantly limits the long-term defensive value of domestic traffic fingerprinting.”
Nonetheless, cybersecurity consultant Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, said the rare nature of this shutdown makes it worth performing whatever data capture is viable.
The signal to noise ratio flips
“From an intelligence perspective, this is one of the rare moments when the signal‑to‑noise ratio flips. If traffic is flowing out of Iran right now, odds are high it’s state‑linked, and that alone makes it worth capturing,” Levine said. “Even legitimate Iranian government activity can be valuable to SOCs. State actors tend to reuse infrastructure, routes, and operational patterns. Today’s ‘normal’ traffic can become tomorrow’s attribution breadcrumb.”
Although Levine agreed that the quantity of actionable long-term data is likely small, he thinks it is still worth capturing. “Collecting digital fingerprints during a blackout won’t solve attribution on its own, but it can sharpen it. In cyber defense, even a few percentage points of clarity can make the difference between catching an intrusion early and missing it entirely.”
However, two VP analysts with Gartner, Jeremy D’Hoinne and Akif Khan, were more skeptical of the data’s value and discouraged CISO teams from pursuing it.
“Attribution is dangerous based on fragmented technical evidence,” D’Hoinne said. “Don’t get distracted.”
Khan was more blunt. “In the fog of war, trying to find verifiable information is very challenging. Without being able to corroborate, I don’t think this goes beyond an intellectual exercise. If people in your enterprise SOC have the time to do this, they need to refocus their priorities.”
