CybersecurityIran becoming serious cyber-warfare threat

Both government and private cybersecurity experts are increasingly considering Iran as a “top ten” cyberthreat. Iran’s recent activities and its motives have led analysts to rank the country among other cyberspace heavy hitters such as Russia and China.

The New York Times reports that American officials believed that several recent computer attacks could be traced to Iran. These targets, the Times notes, “included several American oil, gas and electricity companies,” as well as financial institutions on Wall Street and large systems operations. Further, an official with ties to the DHS told the newspaper that, “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.”

In a little under a year’s time, it seems that little has changed. In fact, the cyber activities of Iran are now increasing. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the “distributed denial of service” attacks, which characterized much of last year’s activity, had abruptly stopped and, following a quiet period, have recently been resumed, but against a much more alarming target — the U.S. military. Recently, attacks have included the US Navy’s Intranet, the largest unclassified network in the service’s arsenal. It took four months to remove the hackers from the system. It is these much more damaging and costly infiltrations that have officials take a much more apprehensive view of Iran’s growing cyber capabilities.

The Monitorquotes Hossein Moussavian, a researcher at Princeton and former Iranian diplomat, who says that much of the offensive shift in Iran’s cyber strategy can be attributed to the U.S-linked Stuxnet worm virus which was engineered to attack Iranian nuclear centrifuges in 2009. “The U.S., or Israel, or the Europeans, or all of them together, started war against Iran. 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.”

Iland Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, goes on to say that “Indeed, not unlike China, Iran appears to be developing its offensive cyber-capabilities as part of an asymmetric tool that can reach around the globe to counterbalance its relatively weak conventional forces.”

Lastly, now that Iran has proven itself to be a more formidable cyber foe, experts recommend charting its course as an example of others to come.

“This operation took down some of the most admirable companies on Wall Street that had deployed some of the most sophisticated defense technology…that’s a harbinger,” says Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at Radware, on the roots of Iran’s cyber-based offensive.