CyberAv3ngers: The Iranian Saboteurs Hacking Water and Gas Systems Worldwide

WIRED

14-04-2025

Apr 14, 2025 6:00 AM Despite their hacktivist front, CyberAv3ngers is a rare state-sponsored hacker group bent on putting industrial infrastructure at risk—and has already caused global disruption. ANIMATION: JAMES MARSHALL
The intermittent cyberwar between Israel and Iran, stretching back to Israel's role in the creation and deployment of the Stuxnet malware that sabotaged Iran's nuclear weapons program, has been perhaps the longest-running conflict in the era of state-sponsored hacking. But since Hamas' October 7 attack and Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza, a new player in that conflict threatens not just digital infrastructure in Israel but also critical systems in the US and around the world.
The group known as CyberAv3ngers has, in the last year and a half, proven to be the Iranian government's most active hackers focused on industrial control systems. Its targets include water, wastewater, oil and gas, and many other types of critical infrastructure. Despite being operated by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to US officials who have offered a $10 million bounty for information leading to their arrest, the group initially took on the mantle of a 'hacktivist' campaign.
CyberAv3ngers has been vocal about their operations that targeted Israel and Israeli technology products. But they've also quietly expanded their target list to include a variety of other devices and networks, including a US oil and gas firm and a wide array of industrial control systems across the world.
All of that makes the hackers, despite their grassroots front, a rare example of state-sponsored cybersaboteurs who have crossed the line of targeting and disrupting critical infrastructure. And they haven't shown any signs of stopping.
'They pretend to be hacktivists, but they're really not. This is a state-sponsored group. They have funding and tooling,' says Kyle O'Meara, a threat intelligence researcher at industrial-control-system cybersecurity firm Dragos, which tracks the group under the name Bauxite. 'They definitely have the capability, they have the intent, and they have the interest in learning how to shut things off and potentially cause harm.'
Though CyberAv3ngers was active as early as 2020, it first came to prominence in November 2023, after Hamas launched its October 7 attack that killed more than 1,200 people and Israel responded with a ground invasion and bombing campaign that has since killed more than 50,000 Palestinians. A month into that ongoing war, the hackers gained access to more than 100 devices sold by the Israeli firm Unitronics—industrial control systems most commonly used in water utilities and wastewater plants. 'Every Equipment 'Made In Israel' Is Cyber Av3ngers Legal Target!' read a post from the group's X account.
In that hacking spree, CyberAv3ngers set the names of the devices to read 'Gaza' and changed their displays to show an image of the group's logo along with a star of David sinking into ones and zeros. 'You have been hacked,' the image read. 'Down with Israel.'
While CyberAv3ngers' initial foray may have appeared to be simple vandalism, The hackers actually rewrote the devices' so-called 'ladder logic,' the code that governs their functionality. As a result, the hackers' changes disrupted service on some victim networks, including a water utility and a brewery near Pittsburgh—distinct facilities that were both coincidentally in the same region—as well as multiple water utilities in Israel and Ireland, according to Dragos and another industrial cybersecurity firm, Claroty, that tracked the hacking campaign.
Around the same time, CyberAv3ngers also posted on Telegram that it had hacked into the digital systems of more than 200 Israeli and US gas stations—incidents which Claroty says did occur in some cases, but were largely limited to hacking their surveillance camera systems—and to have caused blackouts at Israeli electric utilities, a claim that cybersecurity firms say was false.
That initial wave of CyberAv3ngers hacking, both real and fabricated, appears to have been part of a tit-for-tat with another highly aggressive hacker group that is widely believed to work on behalf of Israeli military or intelligence agencies. That rival group, known as Predatory Sparrow, repeatedly targeted Iranian critical infrastructure systems while similarly hiding behind a hacktivist front. In 2021, it disabled more than 4,000 Iranian gas stations across the country. Then, in 2022, it set a steel mill on fire in perhaps the most destructive cyberattack in history. Following CyberAv3ngers' late 2023 hacking campaign, and missile launches against Israel by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, Predatory Sparrow retaliated again by knocking out thousands of Iran's gas stations in December of that year.
'Khamenei!' Predatory Sparrow wrote on X, referring to the supreme leader of Iran in Farsi. 'We will react against your evil provocations in the region.'
Predatory Sparrow's attacks have been tightly focused on Iran. But CyberAv3ngers hasn't limited itself to Israeli targets, or even Israeli-made devices used in other countries. In April and May of last year, Dragos says, the group breached a US oil and gas firm—Dragos declined to name which one—by compromising the company's Sophos and Fortinet security appliances. Dragos found that in the months that followed, the group was scanning the internet for vulnerable industrial control system devices, as well as visiting the websites of those devices' manufacturers to read about them.
Following its late 2023 attacks, the US Treasury sanctioned six IRGC officials that it says were linked to the group, and the State Department put its $10 million bounty on their heads. But far from being deterred, CyberAv3ngers has instead shown signs of evolving into a more pervasive threat.
Last December, Claroty revealed that CyberAv3ngers had infected a wide variety of industrial control systems and internet-of-things (IOT) devices around the world using a piece of malware it developed. The tool, which Claroty calls IOControl, was a Linux-based backdoor that hid its communications in a protocol known as MQTT used by IOT devices. It had been planted on everything from routers to cameras to industrial control systems. Dragos says it found devices infected by the group worldwide, from the US to Europe to Australia.
According to Claroty and Dragos, the FBI took control of the command-and-control server for IOControl at the same time as Claroty's December report, neutralizing the malware. (The FBI didn't respond to WIRED's request for comment about the operation.) But CyberAv3ngers' hacking campaign nonetheless shows a dangerous evolution in the group's tactics and motives, according to Noam Moshe, who tracks the group for Claroty.
'We're seeing CyberAv3ngers moving from the world of opportunistic attackers where their whole goal was spreading a message into the realm of a persistent threat,' Moshe says. In the IOControl hacking campaign, he adds, 'they wanted to be able to infect all kinds of assets that they identify as critical and just leave their malware there as an option for the future.'
Exactly what the group might have been waiting for—possibly some strategic moment when the Iranian government could gain a geopolitical advantage from causing widespread digital disruption—is far from clear. But the group's actions suggest that it's no longer seeking to merely send a message of protest against Israeli military actions. Instead, Moshe argues, it's trying to gain the ability to disrupt foreign infrastructure at will.
'This is like a red button on their desk. At a moment's notice they want to be able to attack many different segments, many different industries, many different organizations, however they choose,' he says. 'And they're not going away.'