Hours after United States medical technology giant Stryker, a hacking group linked to Iran claimed responsibility of it and said it had erased 200,000 systems and extracted 50 terabytes of data. The hacking group said that the cyberattack was done in retaliation to the military attacks on Iran.
In a statement, Handala also referred to the US missile attack on a girls’ school in Minab city of the Middle East country, killing dozens as one of the reasons for the hacking.
“The Zionist-rooted corporation, Stryker, one of the key arms of the global Zionist lobby and a central ring in the ‘New Epstein’ chain, has been struck with an unprecedented blow. In this operation, over 20 000 systems, servers, and mobile devices have been wiped and 50 terabytes of critical data have been extracted,” it said, according to a viral statement on social media.
Claiming “complete success”, Handala said, “Our major cyber operation has been executed with complete success,” as it described the cyberattack as retaliation to the ‘brutal attack” on Minab school and for for “ongoing cyber assaults against the infrastructure of the Axis of Resistance.”
‘New chapter of cyber warfare’
Handala also said that the cyberattack shut down Stryker offices in 79 countries. It said all the data that they had extracted was now in the hands of the “free people of the world.”
“Stryker’s offices in 79 countries have been forced to shut down. All the acquired data is now in the hands of the free people of the world, ready to be used for the true advancement of humanity and the exposure of injustice and corruption,” it said.
It issued an open warning to what it described as “Zionist leaders and their lobbies,” adding, “This is only the beginning of a new chapter in cyber warfare.”
The Handala group later posted that it had also carried out an attack on Verifone, which specializes in electronic and point-of-sale payments, AFP reported.
The cyberattack on Stryker
Following the cyberattack on Stryker which led to a global outage across its systems, the shares of the medical equipment maker fell about 3 per cent.
Staff of the company later said that the logo of an Iran-linked group was appearing on the login pages of all systems, The Wall Street Journal said.
Handala, which has been linked to Iran, emerged around 2022 and has claimed a series of attacks on Israeli and Gulf-region companies in recent weeks.
According to the Journal, an internal company notice described “a severe, global disruption across the Windows environment impacting both client devices and servers” and said Stryker had engaged Microsoft to help investigate.