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Forget China: Iran’s Hackers Are America’s Newest Cyber Threat
In March 2012, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, publicly announced the creation a new Supreme Council of Cyberspace to oversee the defense of the Islamic republic's computer networks and develop news ways of infiltrating or attacking the computer networks of its enemies. Less than two years later, security experts and U.S. intelligence officials are alarmed by how quickly Iran has managed to develop its cyber warfare capabilities -- and by how much it's willing to use them.
For several years, Iran was believed to possess the ambition to launch disruptive attacks on Western, Israeli or Arab computer networks, but not necessarily the technological capability of actually doing so. Those doubts have largely evaporated. In late 2012, U.S. intelligence officials believe hackers in Iran launched a series of debilitating assaults on the Web sites of major U.S. banks. The hackers used a well-honed technique called a denial of service attack, in which massive amounts of traffic are directed at a site's servers until they crash. But the traffic flow in the bank attack was orders of magnitude greater than anything U.S. security officials had seen up to that point, indicating a remarkable degree of technical sophistication.
Last year, U.S. officials say that Iranian hackers infiltrated a large unclassified computer network used by the Navy and Marine Corps. Officials now say it took the Navy four months to fully clear its systems and recover from the breach, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
"Iran should be considered a first-tier cyber power," Gabi Siboni, a cyber security expert with Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, said during a speech in Washington last December.
Western analysts see Iran's embrace of cyber attacks as a strategic attempt to counter the conventional military forces of the United States and Iran's regional rivals, particularly Saudi Arabia. Some analysts have blamed Iran for an attack on the computers of Saudi Aramco, the national energy company that supplies about 10 percent of the world's oil. The attack erased data from 30,000 computers, but it didn't affect oil and gas production and distribution facilities.
Analysts debate whether Iran should yet be included in the same league as the United States, Israel, or China, which each possess extensive capabilities to launch attacks on computer networks and the critical infrastructure connected to them, including electrical power facilities. But U.S. intelligence agencies now judge that Iran is well on the path to becoming a formidable cyber force. James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, recently warned that Iran's "development of cyber espionage or attack capabilities might be used in an attempt to either provoke or destabilize the United States or its partners.
The heart of Iran's national cyber efforts is the cyberspace council set up in 2012. It's chaired by the Iranian president, Hasan Rouhani and its members include senior government officials, including the head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard, which controls military units believed to conduct offensive cyber operations and electronic warfare, such as jamming communications systems. Iran was motivated to ramp up its cyber security efforts, particularly the defense of its internal networks and vital infrastructure facilities, after a cyber attack on an Iraniannuclear facility by the United States and Israel that disabled 1,000 centrifuges used to enrich uranium, a key component of a nuclear weapon. Iran's defensive capabilities today are devoted to preventing another such attack, as well as monitoring and suppressing domestic political opponents who threaten the regime, Siboni wrote in a recentanalysis of Iran's capabilities.
The Revolutionary Guard now owns and controls the biggest communications company in Iran, Siboni said. The government restricts access to the public Internet and monitors computers in Internet cafes. A domestic police force, known as FETA is charged with monitoring online activity and speech, as well as combating fraud and theft.
But it's the offensive side of the ledger that worries U.S. officials the most. In the past week, Iranian leaders have threatened to use cyber warfare against Tehran's enemies. "One of the options on the table of the U.S. and its allies is a cyber war against Iran. But we are fully prepared to fightcyber warfare," said Gen. Mohammad Aqakishi, the commander of the information technology and communication department of the armed forces' general staff, according to Iran's Tasnim news agency.
"[Aqakishi] said the U.S. has been making ‘empty threats' against Iran for several years, noting that Washington itself is mindful of the Islamic Republic's military might in the arena of information technology and communication," Tasnim reported.
Last week, Khameini, Iran's supreme leader, reportedly exhorted Iranian students, whom he called "cyber war agents," to prepare to fight Iran's enemies in cyberspace. "Get yourselves ready for such war wholeheartedly," Khameini said.
"If any war is launched against Iran, we won't give any ground to the enemy and they themselves know this very well," Iran's military chief of staff, Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, said last week, declaring that Iran was prepared for a "decisive battle" with the United States and Israel.
Such provocations haven't gone unnoticed. And U.S. military officials have acknowledged that if the United States uses cyber weapons against Iran, Americans should expect some retaliation. "That's a valid assumption," Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview in January 2013. "There are reports that destructive cyber tools have been used against Iran. I'm not-I'm neither confirming nor denying any-any part in that. What that should tell you is that that capability exists. And if it exists...whoever's using those can't assume that they're the only smart people in the world."
A few days before Dempsey's remarks, Gen. William Shelton, the commander of Air Force Space Command, warned that Iran was a growing offensive threat in cyberspace. "They're going to be a force to be reckoned with, with the potential capabilities that they'll develop over the years and the potential threat that they'll represent to the United States," Shelton said. In other words, Chinese hackers aren't the only ones Washington needs to worry about.
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Israeli Think Tank Acknowledges Iran as Major Cyber Power, Iran Claims its 4th Biggest Cyber Army in World
Iran is now the world’s fourth biggest cyber army, claims an official of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps stressing that the IRGC’s power is seen as a major counterbalance to the US and Israel in the region.
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (“IRGC”)’s Brigadier General Mohammad Hossein Sepehr has said that Iran with its cyberwarfare capabilities is “the fourth biggest cyber power among the world’s cyber armies.”
Brigadier General Hossein added that IRGC has full capability of defending Iranian cyber space. It has protected the country from several cyber attacks conducted by the US and Zionist regime, crushing down the attacks despite sanctions and threats from the West.
The Iranian cyber capabilities were also recognized by an Israeli think tank with a warning to both US and Israel that:
”Iran enjoys remarkable capabilities in the filed of cyberspace technology and can repel enemies’ cyber attacks against its vital infrastructures.”
Another Israel based Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) said that:
”IRGC clearly makes the country one of the best and most advanced nation when it comes to cyberwarface. In a case of escalation between Iran and the West, Iran will likely aim to launch a cyber attack against critical infrastructures in the United States and its allies, including energy infrastructures, financial institutions, transportation systems, and others.”
The INSS provides an in depth analysis of Iran’s cyberwar capability, defining its goals, strategic planning and amount of funding being deployed in the cyber space field in order to tackle any attack from the West.
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Less than a week after Obama showed off the government’s “cybersecurity framework” and “best practices guide for banking, defense, utilities and other industries to help protect themselves against attacks by hackers,” the Wall Street Journal reports the supposed Iranian hack of the Navy’s largest unclassified computer network was more serious than originally reported.
Obama’s Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel explains unconstitutional executive order on cybersecurity last April.
The fresh round of details about the alleged attack initially reported last September raised the hackles of some lawmakers, according to Fox News. They will confront Obama’s choice to head up the NSA, Vice Adm. Michael Rogers, when he comes up for confirmation hearings, possibly next month. The Wall Street Journal reports today Rogers will be grilled on whether there is a long-term plan to address security gaps exposed by the attack.
Fox News believes the incident will not prevent Rogers from being confirmed as NSA director.
According to the Navy, the Iranians hacked into the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, described as an unclassified network used by the Department of the Navy to host websites, store nonsensitive information and handle voice, video and data communications. The Navy says the network has 800,000 users at 2,500 locations.
“It was a real big deal,” a senior U.S. official told the newspaper. “It was a significant penetration that showed a weakness in the system.”
The Journal said U.S. defense officials were taken aback by the skill of the Iranian hackers who were allegedly able to gain access to the network through a security weakness in the public-facing website.
The Navy admits no data was stolen or email accounts compromised. It said, however, that the Iranians were able to conduct surveillance.
If the intrusion is in fact true, it may be viewed as a response to the Stuxnet virus developed jointly by the United States and Israel. According to author David Sanger (Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power), the computer virus was inserted in an air-gaped network located at the Natanz refining facility in Iran.
Initially used to map the facility’s network for the NSA, the code was designed to attack Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. It nearly destroyed one-fifth of them. The virus eventually infected computers located in Indonesia, India, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, the United States and elsewhere.
Iranian Ambassador Hossein Moussavian said during an appearance at the Center for National Security at Fordham Law School the Stuxnet attack prompted Tehran to develop its own cyberwar capability. “The U.S., or Israel, or the Europeans, or all of them together, started war against Iran,” he said. “Iran decided to have… to establish a cyber army, and today, after four or five years, Iran has one of the most powerful cyber armies in the world.”
In January, 2013 U.S. government officials claimed Iran attacked U.S. bank networks in retaliation for economic sanctions imposed on the country in response to Iran’s alleged yet unproven effort to develop a nuclear weapon.
“There is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks,” James A. Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told The New York Times.
In February, Iran’s PressTV accused the United States of exaggerating the threat of cyber attacks. “In the background of this the US has disclosed that it is creating 13 teams of covert hackers to carry out cyber attacks against other countries,” the Iranian government website reported. “The chief of the National Security Agency (NSA) said the teams are offensive in nature and will defend the country against attacks in cyber space.”
Bruce Schneier and other security experts believe the cyber war threat is greatly exaggerated. He warned in 2011 increased and often hysterical rhetoric about the threat of cyber war will result in increased militarization of the internet.
According to Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the problem with the so-called threat of a cyber war is “an element of fear mongering that seems deceptive and more rhetorical than real. Since the discussion is classified and framed in a militarized context, we have no way of knowing what the real concerns are.”
This caution should be used when the Pentagon and U.S. officials, who have a long history of deception and lying, report Iran or any other officially designated enemy is engaged in hacking or cyber attacks, especially when legislation is pending on public-private collaboration on network security.
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