E-mail and Web-based malware, along with distributed denial-of-service attacks, are regularly used parts of Iran's toolkit, Yahyanejad said. The DDoS attacks flood websites with useless requests, knocking them offline. They appear during protests or times of unrest, often as a way of muffling protest on the Internet. "They want to make sure that during those days the videos don't get out quickly enough, [in order] to reduce the media impact of those demonstrations," he said.

In the past few years, a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army has surfaced and defaced websites belonging to Twitter, Chinese search engine Baidu, and just last month, the Voice of America. Nobody knows who the Iranian Cyber Army really is, but Yahyanejad believes that they could be state-sponsored too.

With Iran's Green Revolution protests now just a memory, government opposition now lives on the Internet, not on the streets of Tehran. These latest attacks on Comodo's digital certificates are a next step, made necessary as companies such as Google have pushed more and more users to secure, HTTPS websites, which are much harder for the government to monitor. "It's an indication that they're taking cybersecurity seriously as a theater of conflict," said Cameran Ashraf, an Iranian-American digital activist.

Alex Stamos, a U.S. computer security consultant who is a founding partner at ISec Partners, agrees that the stakes are rising, in Iran and elsewhere. "The major American cloud computing providers and Web service providers -- the Googles and the Facebooks and the Microsofts -- are in a very quiet war with totalitarian governments to keep access to their services available and to keep those people safe," Stamos said.

The lines in this battle are not clear. Are the hackers completely independent, or state employees? Do they operate with the tacit approval of the Iranian government? These questions are hard to answer. But both Comodo CEO Abdulhayoglu and Balatarin's Yahyanejad believe that the attacks that hit them were methodical and well-planned enough that it was likely they were the work of the Iranian government.