The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, made up of members of Parliament and peers, has published a report on Iran, based on evidence taken from August 2021 to August 2023,
Committee chair Lord Beamish, said: “Iran poses a wide-ranging, persistent and unpredictable threat to the UK, UK nationals, and UK interests. Iran has a high appetite for risk when conducting offensive activity and its intelligence services are ferociously well-resourced with significant areas of asymmetric strength. It supplements this with its use of proxy groups – including criminal networks, militant and terrorist organisations, and private cyber actors – to provide it with a deniable means of attacking its adversaries with minimal risk of retaliation. As the Committee was told, Iran is there across the full spectrum of all the kinds of threats we have to be concerned with.
As covered by the 246-page report, the elements of the threat include assassination and kidnap, the country’s nuclear programme, espionage, offensive cyber, interference and intimidation; it then covers how the UK Intelligence Community is responding to these challenges, to keep the UK safe. Lord Beamish added: “We highlight in particular our concern at the sharp increase in the physical threat posed to dissidents and other opponents of the regime who are in the UK – given Iran’s willingness to use assassination as an instrument of state policy; the significant threat of Iranian espionage in support of potential future lethal activity; the importance of negotiating a form of de-escalation between Iran and the international community to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat; and the need both to raise the resilience bar to improve cyber security in the UK and to raise the cost to Iran of launching a cyber attack on the UK so as to deter them from so doing.”
He raised concern that the Government’s policy on Iran has suffered from a focus on crisis management and has been primarily driven by concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme – to the exclusion of other issues.
Espionage
The report describes Iran’s espionage as focused on supporting Iran’s primary objective of regime stability: substantially narrower in scope and scale, and less sophisticated than Russia’s and China’s. In the UK, the Iranian Intelligence Services prioritise targeting opponents of the regime, UK Government and sectors that provide the Iranian regime with an advantage such as academia and defence.
Comment
Dan Schiappa, president, Technology and Services at the cyber firm Arctic Wolf said: “Iran has been climbing the ranks as one of the biggest nation state threats facing the West for a while now, and it’s unsurprising the UK now ranks it on par with Russia. The country is a highly capable and experienced threat actor, with groups such as the Iranian Cyber Army, APT34 and APT35 known to launch destructive wiper attacks, misinformation campaigns and attacks on critical infrastructure.
“What is most concerning is the UK being one of their primary targets. While the petrochemical utilities and finance sectors are the main focus, all businesses throughout the UK should be on high alert. We have already seen how supply chain attacks can disrupt some of the largest companies, so even the smallest businesses should take this warning seriously. This includes patching known vulnerabilities, improving network visibility and ensuring threat detection and response capabilities are in place. Reviewing and hardening all externally facing infrastructure to reduce attack surfaces is also critical. These threat groups are ultimately only going to get more advanced as the nation state landscape evolves – and the UK, and wider West, must be prepared.”
