Representatives with Iran's Permanent Mission to the United Nations were unable to comment Friday.

The Iranian government has been interested in monitoring and controlling its citizens' Internet use for close to a decade now, said Mehdi Yahyanejad, founder of the popular Iranian discussion site Balatarin.

But after the founding of the country's cyberpolice unit in late 2008, Iran began to flex some muscle. Yahyanejad believes that Iran was behind a complicated February 2009 attack that wiped out his website and kept it offline for three weeks. He suspects state involvement, because on the state-sponsored Fars News Agency website within hours of the attack -- before even Yahyanejad himself had had time to figure out what had happened.

With that attack, the hackers used social engineering techniques to trick Yahyanejad's Internet service provider into giving them unauthorized access to his hosting account. And like the Comodo incident, it was meticulously planned and well-executed. Since 2009, Balatarin has been hit with numerous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The most recent, in January of this year, was unprecedented in power.

Iranian dissidents have a lot to worry about on the Internet these days.