Russia has demonstrated that they can conduct so-called "hybrid warfare" as long as it doesn't lead to serious injury or death and the response will be meager. But it still creates pain for those targeted nations.

Iran could be seeing that this approach, rather than more blatant attacks, is a useful way to create problems for the US's allies with a lower risk of elevating those US allies to direct enemies. The intention would be to get the US allies to put pressure on the US (in particular) to back out of the US/Israel war on Iran.