Over the past two weeks, our phones have been ringing with the same question: "Should I be worried about my website right now?"

The short answer is yes — but don't panic. Let's talk about why a conflict thousands of miles away has real implications for your business's online presence, and what you can actually do about it.

Every Modern War Has a Cyber Front

When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran on February 28, the fighting wasn't confined to airstrikes. Within hours, cybersecurity firms started tracking a surge of activity from various hacking groups going after websites, networks, and digital infrastructure across the United States.

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 has identified as many as 60 politically motivated cyber groups mobilizing since the conflict began — a mix of Iranian-aligned and pro-Russian actors. CISA is urging all U.S. organizations to stay vigilant, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center is telling state and local organizations to brace for a wave of DDoS attacks, website defacements, and malicious code injections.

This isn't speculative. It's already underway.

"But Why Would Anyone Come After My Site?"

We hear this constantly, and it's worth spending some time on — because the answer catches most people off guard. Your website doesn't need to be important to be a target. It just needs to be vulnerable.

These groups aren't exclusively going after the Pentagon or Wall Street. Hacktivist groups — politically motivated hackers with varying degrees of state backing — are actively scanning the internet for easy wins. A site running an outdated CMS, using default admin credentials, or sitting on unpatched plugins is exactly what they're looking for.

The reason is straightforward: defacing any American website counts as a propaganda win. Whether it's a multinational bank or a 50-page business website in New England, the defaced homepage tells the same story to their followers.

Cybersecurity professionals call these "targets of opportunity." Former CISA official Matt Hartman has pointed out that hackers consistently exploit unpatched systems, default credentials, and exposed remote services. Recorded Future's analysis of the current threat landscape puts small and medium-sized businesses squarely in the targeting profile alongside larger organizations.

This Has Happened Before

Iran has a long track record of turning to cyberattacks during geopolitical crises.

In 2014, state-backed hackers wiped data from the Las Vegas Sands Casino corporation after its CEO made public comments about Iran — causing tens of millions in damage. In January 2020, after the U.S. killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, Cloudflare tracked a 50% jump in attacks on U.S. government websites from Iranian IP addresses. Hackers defaced sites belonging to the Federal Depository Library Program, the Texas Department of Agriculture, and an Alabama veterans organization. None of them were strategic military targets. All of them were just poorly secured.

In 2023, IRGC-affiliated hackers breached about a dozen U.S. water and wastewater utilities, accessing operational equipment and replacing control system displays with anti-American messages.

The pattern holds: when tensions escalate, cyber activity follows — and targets get chosen based on weak defenses, not strategic importance.

Why This Time Is Different

The sheer number of hacktivist groups in play is unprecedented. CSIS has documented how Iran's hacktivist ecosystem has grown into a coordinated network where the lines between independent activists and state operators are increasingly blurry. During the twelve-day Israel-Iran conflict last June, researchers analyzed over 250,000 Telegram messages and found these groups sharing attack scripts and vulnerability data in real time.

There's also a physical dimension that's new. Iranian drone strikes have hit AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, disrupting cloud services that businesses around the world depend on. This conflict's ripple effects aren't staying in the Middle East.

What We're Doing About It

We think about website security year-round. But moments like this are a good reminder of why proactive measures matter, and what they look like in practice.

Geo-blocking hostile traffic. We configure web application firewalls to block traffic from Iran and other high-risk regions. Sophisticated attackers can route through other countries, but this eliminates a huge volume of automated scanning and drive-by attacks at the door.

Azure DDoS protection. For clients on Microsoft Azure, we use Azure's built-in DDoS mitigation to absorb the volumetric traffic floods that hacktivist groups rely on. Your legitimate visitors stay unaffected even if someone tries to overwhelm your site.

24/7 uptime monitoring. We watch for anomalies around the clock — traffic spikes, unexpected downtime, unauthorized file changes. If something goes sideways at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, we know about it.

Patching and hardening. The unsexy one, and also the most important. Keeping your CMS, plugins, and server software current is the single best defense against becoming someone's easy target. We make our best efforts to handle this proactively for managed clients, so it doesn't fall through the cracks. However, constant vigilance is needed from all parties involved with your website.

Security assessments. Not sure where your site stands? We can evaluate your exposure — outdated software, misconfigured access controls, unprotected login pages, missing certificates — and give you a clear picture of what needs attention.

What You Should Do Next

You don't have to be a government agency or a defense contractor to get caught up in a geopolitical cyber conflict. You just have to be online with a gap in your armor.

If you're not sure whether your website is ready for this environment, get in touch with us for a security assessment. We'll look at where you're exposed, tell you what needs to happen, and make sure your site isn't the low-hanging fruit that some hacktivist group stumbles across in the middle of the night.

Your website's security isn't just an IT line item — it's a business risk. Let's make sure you're covered.

Please note that this article is not intended in any way to be an argument for or against the events in the Middle East, but an explanation of the heightened risks that occur any time there is a conflict anywhere in the world.