Iran's telecommunications minister on Monday accused Israel of a new cyberattack on the Islamic republic's telecom infrastructure and vowed to respond with legal action.
Israel has made no official comment on the accusations.
Last week, Gholamreza Jalali, head of Iran's National Passive Defense Organization, said that his agency had "recently discovered a new generation of Stuxnet which consisted of several parts ... and was trying to enter our systems."
Stuxnet is malware reportedly developed jointly by the U.S. and Israel to target Iran's nuclear program over a decade ago. The use of Stuxnet became public in 2010, after it significantly crippled operations at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
It was the first publicly known example of malware being used to attack industrial machinery.
"The Zionist regime [Israel], with its record of using cyberweapons such as the Stuxnet computer virus, launched a cyberattack on Iran on Monday to harm Iran's communication infrastructures, but thanks to our vigilant technical teams, it failed," Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi said.
Iran plans to take legal action against Israel at international bodies, he added, without giving details.
His deputy, Hamid Fattahi, said more details would be revealed in the coming days, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last week called for stepped up efforts to fight enemy "infiltration" in a speech to officials in charge of cyber defense, state television reported.
"In the face of the enemy's complex practices, our civil defense should… confront infiltration through scientific, accurate, and up-to-date action," he said.
