Following a massive cyberattack on the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Nobitex, the Central Bank of Iran has restricted the operating hours of local crypto exchanges. According to the new regulation, exchanges will only be able to trade between 10:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.
The restriction comes after an attack on the Tehran-based Nobitex exchange in which more than $90 million worth of crypto assets were stolen. The attack was claimed by the pro-Israeli hacker group Gonjeshke Darande (Predatory Sparrow).
The group announced on X (formerly Twitter) that they had infiltrated Nobitex’s infrastructure and threatened to release the platform’s source code and internal data. The same group had also announced an attack on state-owned Bank Sepah the day before.
According to cybersecurity companies, the attackers did not use the stolen funds for profit. On the contrary, they irreversibly “burned” the assets, that is, they made them inaccessible by transferring them to wallets for which they did not have the private key. Some of these wallets contained insulting statements against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, suggesting that the attack was not financial but political.
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic confirmed that more than $90 million in assets from Nobitex were transferred to these “burn” wallets, while Chainalysis found the incident to be in line with a pattern of cyberattacks frequently seen during periods of heightened Israeli-Iranian tensions.
*This is not investment advice.
