Iran defused a second cyberattack in less than a week as this one “aimed at spying on government intelligence”, according to the country’s telecommunications minister.

Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said in a short Twitter post on Sunday the alleged attack was “identified and defused by a cybersecurity shield”, and the “spying servers were identified and the hackers were also tracked”. He did not elaborate.

Last Wednesday, Jahromi told the official IRNA news agency that a “massive” and “governmental” cyberattack also targeted Iran’s electronic infrastructure.

He provided no specifics on the purported attack except to say it was also thwarted and a report would be released.

On Tuesday, the minister dismissed reports of hacking operations targeting Iranian banks, including local media reports claiming that accounts of millions of customers were hacked.

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Iran disconnected much of its infrastructure from the internet after the Stuxnet computer virus, widely believed to be a joint US-Israeli creation, disrupted thousands of Iranian centrifuges in the country’s nuclear sites in the late 2000s.

In June, Washington officials said US cyberforces launched an attack against Iranian military computer systems as President Donald Trump backed away from plans for a more conventional military attack in response to Iran’s downing of a US surveillance drone in the Gulf.

Tensions have escalated between the United States and Iran ever since Trump withdrew the US last year from the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran and began a policy of “maximum pressure”. Iran has since been hit with multiple rounds of sanctions.