Iran-Linked Hackers Target U.S. Companies

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I'm Tray Gowdy.

I'm Martha McCallum.

I'm Ben Dominic and this is the Fox News rundown.

Friday, March 13th, 2026.

I'm Tanya J. Powers.

As the conflict in Iran continues, the risk of cyber threats to America is rising.

And on that front, cyber security experts warn that we're up against a formidable adversary.

Iran has a very well thought out, meticulous, sophisticated cyber warfare actions.

They've been doing it for years.

They are good at this.

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Pro-Iranian hackers are targeting sites not just in the Middle East, but the US as well,

claiming responsibility for a significant cyber attack this week against striker, an

American medical device company.

There have been examples of Iran's cyber capabilities in recent years, including infiltrating

the email system of President Trump's campaign, the targeting of US water plants, and attempts

to breach the networks used by military and defense contractors.

And the threat is increasing as the conflict in Iran wears on.

Obviously, it's the new modern battlefield that we live in today.

And cyber threats and risk and attacks are just a part of it.

It is our now everyday life.

Michael Kreen is a senior vice president at Sonic Wall and a US Army combat veteran.

Iran has a very well fought out, meticulous, sophisticated cyber warfare actions.

They've been doing it for years.

They are good at this.

We are confident that, and we've seen it already.

It's happened.

We know that infrastructure is more at risk.

We know that health care is more at risk.

We know that things that matter to us aren't staying in region anymore.

It used to be when you're worried about an attack, you're probably worried about the things

that are closest to you, we're all interconnected.

Every device that we have is connected to every other device that's out there, and it's

evident that after the kinetic warfare started, that we've seen what people may want to

try to disassociate with what happened to striker and that attack that happened with them

with the wiper malware, but I have the greatest belief that this was truly an attack that

was backed by the Iranian government.

That group has got strong ties to them, and I believe that they are probably well-funded

by the Iranian government.

And it was a complete destruction event.

It wasn't the typical, let me ransom you, let me try to extort you, let me try to get money

out of you.

This was a comment and destroy everything event and walk away, and thousands of people had

to go away from their jobs, not just here in the United States, but it even went to Ireland,

one of their largest manufacturing facilities outside of the United States.

Let's talk a little bit about striker.

It is a major U.S. medical technology company.

As you mentioned, they sustained what they called a global network disruption to their

Microsoft environment.

Talk a little bit about what happens when a business is targeted.

I know that, like you said, there's a lot of information on regular Americans that sometimes

get swept up in all of this, but what are they trying to do when they target these companies?

In this particular instance, from the data that we've been able to gather and what we

have here at Sonic Wall, we believe this was just the ultimate form of bullying, if you

will.

They wanted to come in and destroy everything that they could to shut these operations

down.

And because it has such a global effect, like, yes, U.S.-based organization, we are going

to take the brunt of this, but the equipment that they manufacture is so incredibly important

to the world and the hospitals and the medical procedures that are happening there.

This creates a much larger problem that spans all countries that happen to take this type

of equipment and use it in their medical procedures.

It is the common of what is happening in warfare today.

I mean, if you were doing just kinetic attacks, you want to take out infrastructure, you want

to take out water, you want to take out communications, well, because it's now cyber, you could

take out anything that's important to people and medical is incredibly important.

Oh, yeah, you mentioned healthcare.

You mentioned some other things.

I want to get back to some more of those examples in a second.

What responsibility do businesses have to tell people that they've been targeted in this

way?

And I think we all have a responsibility and it isn't just the businesses.

These folks like me, I've been doing this for a very long time as a CEO and founder of

a company and now working at Sonic Wall and this global goal.

We have an opportunity and a responsibility to educate ourselves and be responsible about

it.

No fear uncertainty in doubt.

We don't need this to be something that we run around and the sky is falling.

We really need to educate ourselves and understand that we're at risk and do some of the most simple

basic things that is it going to always win the fight, no, but can we make it harder

for these threat actors, for these nation states to come after us and do things that we

could probably defend against?

So you mentioned what we can do and the things that are at risk, healthcare, are we talking

about like banks, things like that?

Is there something ordinary Americans, are we at risk, first of all, just regular folks?

I mean, obviously you mentioned the businesses and the huge impact that would have if you're

a global manufacturer of something that's obviously, you know, that one's kind of obvious

on top of the line there, but what can just regular folks do, should we be worried about

a risk as well?

You know, I don't think my mom living in small town Ohio is probably the target that they're

looking for, but we as everyday citizens, we do have to be concerned about how we participate

in keeping ourselves safe and how we don't allow for our own personal computers to become

a launching point, to become an opportunity for somebody to weaponize, to then take a

greater attack, because now they have more computing power, a capable to them, because

now the attack may seem like it's coming from inside of the United States and not originating

from Iran or from some other country that we would expect it to come from.

And some of those simple things are, if you get an email from somebody that looks silly,

don't click on it.

I don't think Walmart's probably going to give you a $10,000 gift card because you got

an email from them.

It doesn't normally work that way.

Make sure you keep up with your patches.

Most manufacturers do a great job of giving it to you for free, multi-factor authentication.

It is a part of our everyday necessary life, and yes, I get it.

It's a pain.

It slows us down.

But it's one of those things that can be such a significant win that we participate in.

And when you participate in your personal life that way, then you go to work.

And when you're doing it in your personal life and maybe work isn't doing it, you become

more educated and more supportive to the businesses that you're working and say, hey, what

are we doing about patch management?

What are we doing about monitoring our systems?

Why aren't we using MFA?

Like, I'm coming in and I'm just being able to walk through the door.

And most of the time you at least have to use a badge.

We've got to use a key.

There's some restrictions we put in place, but because technology is so easy and fast,

we tend to not treat it with the sensitivity that we should.

We've been speaking with Michael Creen, senior vice president at Sonic Wall and a US Army

combat veteran, more after this.

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I mentioned these companies being targeted, could Iran or anybody, I guess, but especially

Iran in this case or pro-Iran groups, could they deploy cyber attacks on the US government

to maybe tamper with our military warfare, targeting data, that kind of thing?

Is that at risk?

Absolutely.

I mean, everything is at play right now.

It's said at earlier, we have so many millions of sensors here at Sonic Wall that we have

deployed around the world and all of this data that we're constantly gathering and everything

is at risk.

We're all interconnected.

If I am a foreign adversary, they play I'm not, you know, I do want to take a tack against

the government.

I want to take an attack against the government in a way that I look at a contractor that

maybe isn't doing the right things and find them as the weakest points that give me a launch

to get into that environment or gives me an easy way of taking advantage of something

because maybe they have some elevated privileges and escalation way of doing things that wouldn't

be so easy for me to get by myself.

So yes, our government is under attack for sure.

So is this an opportunity for other bad actors, other nation states to do something?

And, you know, I think maybe the first thing we would probably jump to is, you know, to

blame Iran or an Iran back to our pro-Iran group.

Would this be an ideal opportunity for somebody else who had bad intentions to kind of get

in under the wire and make it look like it was it was Iran's fault to go unnoticed or

anything like that?

Is that possible?

It's always possible.

I mean, we've seen this, you know, we've seen copycat murderers, for instance, where there's

a string of murders that happen and then somebody else starts acting like that particular

murder.

This is really simple.

If somebody has an axe to grind and they're not happy with us as a country and we know

that we're at war with Iran, well, why not make it look like it's them attacking us

and trying to fight back and take advantage of whatever it is they think that they can

do to enter our operations and they go undetected.

You know, whether they are another pseudo-state-sponsored organization that we don't know that

Iran is working with or they're truly just an activist believing that they're right,

we're wrong and they're going to do something about it.

This is an unsettling conversation.

I'll just be honest with you because there is so much of our data is already out there.

We're already, as you mentioned, interconnected.

Everybody's got, you know, most everybody's got a smartphone, a device of some sort that

you keep with you.

You've got your laptop, you've got your computer at home.

It seems almost impossible to keep things kind of buttoned up.

Is there a, what do you tell people, hey, here's a way that you can make sure, you know,

is it just as simple as updating, you know, our software and making sure we have the patches

and making sure we have, you know, things running on our computer to keep them safe?

And is that, is that going to do anything, you know, it seems like an umbrella in a hurricane

situation.

So it's a good starting point, you know, you didn't learn how to ride a bike and you

just got on it without training wheels and lends.

You had to start somewhere.

And what we see through the work that we do here at Sonic, well, we see quite often.

It's almost nine out of every ten times that it's human error that causes some of these

compromisers or events or ransomware breaches.

Whatever you want to call it, that it's the human error of, I had all of this amazing

technology and yet I didn't know what I was doing with it.

I didn't know how to configure it.

I thought I knew and I tried my best, but I didn't have enough time to get educated

I didn't have a professional services organization monitoring it.

I think we do this in our homes.

We have all of these valuables, whether they be the family heirlooms or something of the

pictures of the children that you have and the things that you find most precious to

you.

And we put locks on our doors and our windows and we put alarm systems on there and we

do things to try to contain these physical precious things that we have, but we don't

treat our data the same way.

So yes, doing these updates is a great start.

Having complex passwords, using a password manager, you know, please don't use your kids

birthday.

Don't use coffee.

Everybody loves some coffee in the morning to get it going.

Probably not a good password to use.

It's about a maturity, you know, when I started in my career, whether it was my military

career or this career that I'm in now, I didn't know the things when I started that I

knew when I am here as it stands today.

I keep growing that knowledge.

I keep utilizing it in different ways.

Even professional athletes are exactly the same way.

So yeah, do the patches have the have the unique passwords?

How do great password manager use the MFA and stop sharing so much data on social media?

It makes it easy to start compiling that information to find more of the uniqueness

about you and then attack you in a way.

And now that we all live in this world of AI, and I hate getting into this topic, but

we all talk about it every single day, AI makes what I'll call the dumb hacker smart.

It makes the lazy hacker active.

What are the questions that are not being asked that you would love for somebody to catch

on to, so to speak, what is what's not being covered here that you see as a huge opportunity

to, for us to start a conversation about?

What can I do to participate in my own personal life, but what can I do in my business?

You know, we're, what is it, the, the amount of separation between you and Kevin Bacon

was always the joke, I think, and I don't remember the number of steps that people say

with that.

That's six degrees.

Now, six degrees.

There it is.

Sorry.

But think about that and how it works in our everyday life.

There is probably only six degrees of separation between our personal lives, our professional

lives, and how it interacts and gets back to supporting our country, taking care of

our nation's defense.

Sometimes we don't think about how our small actions can have an impact, asking those questions,

being curious, not accepting the norm as the thing that we're just like, well, they're

smart.

They know what they're doing.

Well, they might be smart.

They might know what they're doing, but they might also be overwhelmed.

They may not have all of the information.

Maybe you have something that's relevant that's happened to you because you experienced

somebody stealing your social security number, somebody stealing your identity and taking

your money.

It's really just starting as a conversation and being open to receive information and how

do you implement that in your personal life, because it will have a cascading effect.

Michael Crane is a senior vice president at Sonic Wall and a US Army combat veteran.

Michael, thank you so much for joining the Fox News rundown.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it by the time you've been listening to the Fox News rundown.

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