Name: Iran appears to have conducted cyberattack against a U.S. company
Uploaded: 2026-03-13T23:01:52.000Z
Duration: 4 min 51 s
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As the war continues in Iran, it looks like the first retaliation stateside is something that we saw today or yesterday.

It is a physical, it's not a physical strike.

An Iran linked hacker group has claimed responsibility for a cyber attack on a medical tech company, Stryker.

This is the first since the start of the war.

The company is known for producing medical equipment tech.

There was an anonymous employee that told NBC News that work issued phones and laptops completely stopped working on Wednesday.

And we don't know the specific of how the group was able to pull off this hack, but

one expert says it might have been through the company's Microsoft Intune account that allows remote users to completely wipe a device.

Let's bring in NBC News cybersecurity reporter Kevin Collier, who wrote about this hack by Iran and has a lot more details here.

So Kevin, what does it say right now about Iran's cyber war capabilities?

Yeah, there's no doubt that Iran is kind of lashing out in all kinds of different ways right now.

And cyber is just one of the many ways it's doing that, that it's had these persistent cyber capabilities for a while, but

they are decidedly a rung below Russia, a few rungs below China.

What they do have is persistence and sometimes clever approaches to kind of crimes of opportunity.

They're going to go wherever they can find an in.

That said, you mentioned the Intune thing.

It's something that nobody I know in the space really saw coming.

This Microsoft Intune program is something that large corporate kind of IT departments will use to manage.

Like a whole fleet of phones and tablets and computers.

And the way you manage that includes an option to just wipe remotely if an employee is fired or something is stolen.

And so what it looks like they did is they just accessed, they got somebody's kind of logging credentials for Intune and then just wiped tons and tons of company devices.

And you can imagine it's not just the fact that you can't log on and communicate and email, mail, and

use whatever you're doing for work, but also you have to have your IT department reinstall absolutely everything.

Just how much that would grind a company to a halt?

What safeguards are in place right now to protect things like, like power grids or nuclear plants from a potential hack that you didn't see coming?

I would say the good news is a lot of times there's Something they call in the industry security by obscurity.

And that a lot of times an industrial control system is usually ICS is what they call them, often run on custom operating systems, are often hard to access, they're often confusing to access.

And if you don't know exactly what you're looking at, it can be really hard to manipulate them.

Iran has in recent years been incredibly accused of hacking into some operating systems for some American water facilities, wastewater and drinking water facilities.

However, they didn't ever demonstrate an ability to understand, like, hey, if we increase enough chlorine, we can turn this water poisonous and kind of spread it into some local town, which is the nightmare scenario.

The good news is we've not actually seen them actually demonstrate an ability to do that.

Your nightmares in this space are way worse than my nightmares.

There's the infrastructure question and then there's this cyber, I don't know, propaganda, disinformation, a slop war that we now see happening in a way that I don't think we've ever seen it before.

We've got things coming from Iran, things coming from Russia.

The White House is posting some pretty interesting meme clips like, what's your, what's your take on all this?

It's streamlined, a lot of streamlined hacking in a lot of ways.

It's also streamlined propaganda and online influence operations.

Of course, I think that a lot of social media, X in particular, I think if you go on there, you don't even know a lot of the time what you're doing, if you're looking at it, is not only the source of it, but

And Iran does appear to be doing it just the same as like you said, the White House uses this, Russia uses this.

It is omnipresent and it is wrapped up deeply into online messaging from all kinds of different powers.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, you see it and you may think it's harmless, and

Once a seed is in your brain, it's hard to get it out.

Kevin Collier, always appreciate your reporting.

And remember, stay updated on breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app or watch live on our YouTube channel.