Week of March 5, 2026

From the publisher’s desk

As (an undeclared) war goes on in the Middle East, we don’t have to worry much about bomb or missile attacks here in the United States.

But that doesn’t mean the U.S. can’t be harmed by actors loyal to the Iranian government.

Amazon.com was not working properly for a good chunk of the day—and this outage may (or may not) have to do with what is happening in the Middle East. After all, tech operations are under literal attack. CNBC reports:

Amazon’s data center in Bahrain was targeted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for the company’s support of the U.S. military, Iranian state media said Wednesday.

The company’s cloud computing unit said Monday that one of its facilities in Bahrain was damaged due to a nearby drone strike on Sunday. Two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were also damaged after they were “directly struck” by drones.

All of the facilities remain offline, according to the Amazon Web Services health dashboard.

The attack in Bahrain was launched “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities,” Iran’s Fars News Agency said on Telegram.

Meanwhile, security experts say American institutions could be targets for cyberattacks by Iran.

CBS News reports:

“We’re tracking groups associated with the Revolutionary Guard Corps and with the Ministry of Intelligence, and those groups have gone silent,” said Alexander Leslie, Recorded Future’s senior advisor for government affairs.

Leslie works for the private intelligence company, scouring the open and dark web along with other sources to identify cyber threats against U.S. critical infrastructure, organizations, and people.

“And as of this moment, there is no evidence suggesting any significant attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure linked to Iranian threat groups,” he said.

Leslie, however, said there is evidence of low-level, low-intensity attacks associated with so-called Iran hacktivist groups.

“Cyber is no longer auxiliary to conflict. It is part of the battlefield,” he said. …

“Iran has attacked our banking system, they’ve attacked oil infrastructure, they’ve done mis- and disinformation during elections, they’ve attacked water utilities and other critical infrastructure,” (Jake Braun, executive director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago) said. “I think we can expect all those attacks, again, and more severe attacks.”

According to HeatlhCare IT News, “Hospitals, health systems and other healthcare organizations nationwide face real risks in the form of retaliation for U.S. military strikes on Iran, according to the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which notes that cyberattacks may come from loosely aligned hacktivist groups rather than directly from the nation-state itself.”

The same goes for banks and financial institutions. According to Reuters (via The Times of Israel): “The U.S. financial services industry is on heightened alert for potential cyberattacks amid the unfolding war in Iran, with firms stepping up monitoring for threats that often rise during periods of geopolitical conflict, say executives and analysts. The conflict has stoked concerns over the potential for Iran-linked cyberattacks on US financial services operations. According to a U.S. intelligence assessment that Reuters reported yesterday, Iran-aligned ‘hacktivists’ could conduct low-level cyberattacks against US networks, such as distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), whereby hostile actors overwhelm a targeted server with a flood of internet traffic.”

All of this is happening at a time when the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency that CNBC calls the “leading readiness body” to counteract cyberattacks, is a mess. CNBC reports: “The agency has reportedly lost about a third of its employees since Trump took office, and Madhu Gottumukkala, its temporary director, was reassigned to another division of DHS last week. During Gottumukkala’s tenure, he clashed with staff and ended major contracts, Politico reported. He also came under scrutiny for uploading sensitive documents to ChatGPT and failed a polygraph test administered by CISA staff when he sought access to records. … As of Tuesday afternoon, CISA’s website said it was last updated on Feb. 17 due to a ‘lapse in federal funding’ and is not being actively managed.”

As we sometimes say this space … stay tuned.

—Jimmy Boegle, publisher/executive editor