Key Points
The US-Israel-Iran conflict is no longer confined to the battlefield. It is already affecting the commercial systems and services businesses rely on every day.
Companies do not need to be direct participants in the conflict to be targeted. Business relationships, supply chain roles, and public ties to involved countries may be enough.
The threat is expanding beyond espionage and nuisance disruption toward pressure on critical infrastructure, suppliers, cloud and identity platforms, and connected devices.
It's important for organizations to prioritize supply-chain exposure mapping, stronger controls on privileged access, review of internet-connected devices, and tested offline backups that can withstand attacks.
The US-Israel-Iran conflict has moved beyond the kinetic battlefield. It is already disrupting the commercial systems and digital services that global businesses rely on.
Since the start of the conflict in late February, it has expanded well beyond governments and militaries, with real consequences now being felt by private companies and the everyday digital infrastructure that underpins global commerce.
That changes who is exposed. When Iran physically struck commercial cloud data centers in the UAE and Bahrain with drones, it sent a clear message that the digital platforms businesses rely on are no longer being treated as separate from strategic targets.
When the pro-Iranian group “Handala” claimed to have destroyed more than 200,000 computers, servers, and mobile devices at a US medical technology firm, it showed that an organization does not need to be directly involved in the conflict to be pulled into it. Handala’s targeting of a major point-of-sale (POS) provider reinforces the same point.
And when hacktivist groups such as “NoName057(16)” and “Keymous+” began announcing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) targets in protest against Western support of Israel, the objective was not just technical disruption. It was also to create pressure, generate attention, and add a constant stream of noise and reputational risk to an already volatile environment.
Taken together, these developments point to a threat environment that is becoming broader, less predictable, and more willing to use the private sector as a pressure point. It's clear that geopolitical conflict can affect business operations. The question now is how far that pressure spreads across cloud platforms, supply chains, customer relationships, and brand reputation. Business leaders should be preparing not only for attempted intrusions, but for disruption, third-party fallout, and fast-moving incidents that can create operational and reputational consequences at the same time.
In this spotlight, we:
Explain how Iran’s cyber program evolved into a tool for retaliation, disruption, and pressure beyond the traditional battlefield.
Detail what could come next across critical infrastructure, supply chains, and connected devices.
Provide actionable guidance to help organizations reduce exposure and respond faster.
How Iran Built Its Hacking Program
When most people think of Iran’s conflict with the West, they think of missiles, sanctions, and diplomatic standoffs. But for years, Iran has also built cyber capabilities as a core tool of asymmetric warfare.
After a US-Israeli cyber attack on its nuclear program in 2010 (Stuxnet), Iran did not just respond tactically. It invested strategically and stealthily, leveraging cyber to retaliate, compete, and impose costs without inviting a full-scale military confrontation. What followed was not a side effort, but the steady development of one of the world’s most active and aggressive cyber programs.
Since then, the activity linked to Iran has shown a consistent pattern. The targets have extended well beyond governments to include banks, media companies, infrastructure, and private industry. The methods have ranged from espionage and credential theft to disruptive attacks, destructive malware, and pressure campaigns designed to create fear or force a response.
Iranian cyber activity has been tied to operations targeting a US presidential campaign, and Iran-linked actors have also been associated with large-scale denial-of-service attacks. Those incidents emphasized that the target set is broad, the objectives not limited to traditional espionage, and the impacts often damaging.
How the Cyber Conflict Could Develop
The incidents and targeting patterns seen so far in the US-Iran conflict are unlikely to be random. They suggest a broader effort to build options for future disruption, deepen access, and create pressure points that can be activated when it matters most.
Attacks on Power Grids, Water Systems, Hospitals
Attacks on critical infrastructure have never been just about disruption for disruption’s sake. When power, water, or health-care systems are targeted, the objective is usually larger: to create fear, overwhelm responders, and show that essential services can be touched.
That history matters now. Rather than focusing only on data theft or conventional ransomware, the more serious risk is a shift toward operations designed to create real-world consequences inside operational environments. In practice, that could mean attempts to interfere with industrial processes, manipulate sensor data, disable safety controls, or trigger outages that are difficult to reverse quickly.
Critical infrastructure offers something most other targets do not. It can generate immediate public anxiety and force a visible response. A successful intrusion into a hospital network, water system, or regional utility does more than interrupt operations. It creates a public safety issue.
The concern, then, is not just whether these systems are being probed, but what an adversary may ultimately want from that access. The real objective may be to hold essential services at risk, disrupt them at a chosen moment, and turn a cyber incident into a broader crisis.
Moving Through the Supply Chain to Reach the Real Target
As direct attacks become harder, the focus is shifting outward to the broader commercial ecosystem surrounding the real target, like choking global oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. That means logistics providers, cloud and hosting environments, financial services firms, software vendors, and other companies that sit inside the supply chain but may not view themselves as front-line targets. For some organizations, public ties to Israel may be enough to increase that risk, even if they are not directly involved in the conflict.
The value of these organizations is not always in their own data. It is in their access, trust, and connectivity. If an adversary can compromise a major supplier, service provider, or platform that others depend on, they can ride that relationship inward and bypass a lot of traditional defenses while causing maximum impact.
Modern businesses run on interconnected systems — a single set of login credentials, shared administration tools, and software that automatically updates across the whole organization. This convenience is also a vulnerability. If an attacker steals the right login credentials, that one set of keys can unlock everything at once. If they tamper with the software a company builds or deploys, they can hide inside a legitimate update and get automatically installed across the entire business. If they gain access to your cloud management tools, they can see and control everything connected to it.
That is why the next phase may not center only on headline organizations themselves, but on the commercial and technical infrastructure around them. Rather than simply breaching one company, the point is to move through the relationships, platforms, and dependencies that make modern businesses work.
If they cannot get in through the front door, they will look for the vendor, platform, or provider that already has a direct path in.
Surveillance Cameras as Access Points, Not Just Surveillance Targets
Attempts to exploit surveillance cameras are already happening. These systems are unlikely to be targeted at this volume for no reason. In the short term, access to cameras can support kinetic attack planning and damage assessment — helping an adversary see a site, monitor activity, understand security posture, or assess the impact of an incident in real time.
Once a camera is compromised, it can become much more than a passive source of footage. Because these devices often sit inside trusted network environments and lack the protections placed on laptops or servers, they can be used as quiet entry points for follow-on cyber activity.
That access could support deeper network infiltration, internal reconnaissance, credential theft, malware deployment, or data exfiltration. In other words, the camera may be the first foothold, not the end goal.
That is what makes this trend worth watching. Surveillance cameras are being targeted not just because they can see the environment, but because they can provide a pathway into it. What starts as physical visibility can quickly become digital access.
Step Up Your Defenses Against Iranian Cyber Threats
ReliaQuest’s Approach
The ReliaQuest GreyMatter agentic AI security operations platform is well suited to defending against the kinds of attacks Iranian state-aligned and proxy actors are most likely to use during periods of geopolitical escalation.
GreyMatter Agentic Teammates help security teams identify and prioritize emerging campaigns faster by turning fragmented threat intelligence into actionable investigations; surfacing activity tied to an organization’s industry, geography, and technology stack; and helping teams adapt detections as Iranian actors shift from phishing and credential theft to disruptive and destructive operations.
GreyMatter Workflows supports rapid and repeatable containment when time matters most. That is especially important in Iranian intrusion patterns, where attackers often move from initial access to broader business disruption by abusing valid accounts, administrative access, and trusted enterprise tools. With built-in automation, teams can quickly isolate endpoints, disable compromised accounts, coordinate across security and IT, and take containment actions before an intrusion turns into a wiper event or large-scale operational outage.
GreyMatter Transit adds another layer of defense by detecting threats while telemetry is still moving, which helps organizations reduce detection lag and gain visibility earlier in the attack lifecycle. In the context of Iranian operations, this matters because many campaigns are not solely about data theft, but about disrupting operations, destroying data, and undermining business continuity. By detecting suspicious activity in motion and improving visibility across the environment, GreyMatter Transit helps organizations spot the signals that often come before destructive actions, including abuse of management infrastructure, suspicious account behavior, and attacker movement across the estate.
These capabilities help organizations respond to the forms of risk most closely associated with Iranian cyber operations, including destructive malware, credential compromise, use of legitimate tools for malicious purposes, and attacks aimed at data availability and operational resilience.
What Companies Should Do Now
You don't need to understand how these attacks work technically to make the right decisions. Here's what the business needs:
Know who has access to your business and through whom. Make a list of suppliers, vendors, and partners with ties to Israel or the Middle East and understand what level of access they have to your systems.
Limit who can control your technology and watch for anything unusual. Any system that gives someone that level of power over your business should be tightly restricted, require extra verification to log into, and raise an alarm the moment something looks out of the ordinary.
Check that your physical building systems aren't an open door. Security cameras, industrial equipment, and access control systems that are connected to the internet are frequently left with the factory-default passwords still in place. Iranian-linked groups actively search for these devices. Ensure you have someone responsible for reviewing them, because they are almost never part of routine IT maintenance.
Make sure you have a backup that no one can touch. A destructive attack can't erase data that it can't reach. Your company should have copies of its most critical information stored somewhere completely disconnected from your network. And, crucially, your team should have tested that those backups actually work before they're ever needed in a real crisis.
