Albania's parliament was targeted by a cyberattack on Monday, it announced on Tuesday, with a group believed to be affiliated with Iran claiming responsibility for the attack.
The parliament said that there was no data loss caused by the attack and that experts were working to fix the site. According to the parliament, the source of the attack was from several different countries outside of Albania.
The hacker group known as "Homeland Justice" claimed responsibility for the attack, as well as for cyberattacks against the One Albania phone company, Air Albania, and Eagle Mobile. The group claimed that it deleted two petabytes of data from the targeted sites and would publish data it had accessed.
The hackers said they were conducting the attacks as part of a "mission" they called #DestroyDurresMilitaryCamp, a reference to the headquarters of Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) in the Albanian county of Durrës.
MEK was designated for several years as a terrorist group by the US, UK, EU, Japan and Canada, but was delisted in these countries about a decade ago.
In June, Albanian State Police raided MEK's headquarters, confiscating electronic devices on the suspicion that members of the group were inciting war, and illegally intercepting and interfering with computer data. Police said the Iranian dissident group had violated agreements they made with Albanian authorities when they moved to the country about a decade ago.
Albania's past with Iranian cyberattacks
In June 2022, Albania was targeted by the Homeland Justice group, leading the Balkan country to sever ties with Iran in September of that year. When Albania severed ties, Prime Minister Edi Rama said that it had been confirmed "with indisputable evidence" that Iran was behind the attack.
The Mandiant cybersecurity company reported at the time as well that it had found that the attack was carried out with malware commonly used by Iranian hackers. Mandiant estimated that one or multiple threat actors working for Iran were involved in the cyberattack.
Shortly after it severed ties, Albania was hit by another Iranian cyberattack.