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US imposes sanctions on ArvanCloud

US imposes sanctions on ArvanCloud

The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Friday fired Iran-based tech firm ArvanCloud and two senior employees based in the United Arab Emirates “for their role in supporting cyber censorship.” Iranian regime” subject to sanctions. The US is following the EU’s move in November 2022, about three weeks after joint research was published by netzpolitik.org. taz And correction.

In US Treasury Department press release It[called:[அழைக்கப்பட்டது:

Arvan Cloud is a key partner of Iran’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology in the development of the National Information Network (NIN), which is used to disconnect Iranians from the global Internet. ArvanCloud maintains close ties with Iran’s intelligence services, including the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and Arvan Cloud executives have extensive ties to senior Iranian government officials.

The justification for US sanctions supports investigative research at the time. ArvanCloud has played a key role in developing the Iranian government’s NIN infrastructure, a censored version of the Internet controlled by the Iranian authorities. The research revealed that during the Iranian uprising, the regime attempted to switch domestic internet traffic to NIN to mitigate billions of dollars in lost economic activity in the event of an internet blackout or shutdown.

“As a web hosting service and content delivery network, Arvan Cloud helped lay the foundation for NIN’s integrated cloud network infrastructure,” the US Treasury Department said. In contracts with the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Arvan Cloud agreed to provide interception services to the government, allowing Iranian authorities to control and audit incoming and outgoing data traffic and monitor data on servers. Arwan Cloud also blocked websites at the request of Iran’s Committee to Determine Instances of Criminal Content (CDICC), according to the US Treasury Department.

As of October 2022, ArvanCloud denies all this. Company says on Twitter“Cloud services cannot play any role in filtering, auditing or control, directly or indirectly”.

A German company was also involved at that time

Collaborative research by taz, correction and netzpolitik.org and independently Report of the Daily Mirror In October 2022, a German company from Meerbusch in North Rhine-Westphalia joined forces with ArvanCloud to set up a closed internet in Iran. During the research and beyond, the German company operated several data centers in Europe that could guarantee the operation of the internal Iranian network if the Internet was shut down. As part of this research, the role of ArvanCloud is described in more detail and how a national intranet works as an audit tool.