TEHRAN (Iran News) –  The head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization considers the United States and the Israeli regime to have been behind the cyberattack that caused a temporary outage at gas stations in large cities across the Islamic Republic.

“From our point of view, this attack has definitely been carried out by the Americans and the Zionists,” Brigadier General Gholam-Reza Jalali said in a televised interview.

The attack targeted “the middleware” in the fuel delivery systems, he said, describing the type of attack as very complicated and difficult to fend off.

“If the attack had taken place in the hardware layer, there would have been a need for infiltration,” meaning either the company that has manufactured the software would have been responsible or a disrupting piece of equipment would have to be installed to make the attack possible, the official noted.

The brief outage was caused on Tuesday. Local news agencies reported at the time that long queues that had been formed in front of gas stations in large Iranian cities had cleared up after Oil Ministry authorities dispatched teams to the forecourts to enable offline fuel delivery.

Three hours following the attack, 30 percent of the gas stationed resumed their offline services, while 12 hours after the attack, 60 percent returned to the normal status, Jalali said.

“Continued operation of the [country’s] infrastructures is the Passive Defense Organization’s redline because it affects the people’s lives,” he noted, adding, “Serious infrastructural cyber warfare has started. We should take it seriously and rectify our areas of weakness.”

He expounded on the missions of the Passive Defense Organization, saying one of the last measures adopted by the organization is to study the recent cyberattack on the country’s gas stations as well as moves to ensure the security of the nation’s cyber-infrastructure.

The top general said the hacking attack on the pumps took place at the middleware level, “which is a very complicated attack and difficult to counter.”

“The cyberattack on billboards was also connected to the attack on the fuel distribution system,” he noted.

He said elements inside the country may have been involved in the cyberattacks, adding security authorities are probing the issue.

Last year, as many as 1,400 drills were held to reinforce the country’s cyber defense prowess, he noted, adding that so far this year 66 such maneuvers have gone underway.