- Wednesday, 13 December 2017 20:45
NCRI Staff
NCRI - The Iranian Regime is one of the leading cyber security
threats to the United States, having conducted several highly damaging
cyber-attacks so far, and experts believe it will only get worse.
Unlike many other US cyberspace adversaries, the Iranian Regime
openly recruits hackers and supports their independent cyberattacks
against enemies of the Regime. This includes not just enemy states but
also dissidents, human rights activists, and journalists.
Their hackers became prominent in the mid-2000s for defacing tens of
thousands of websites to show defences of the Iranian Regime but the
Iranian Cyber Army (ICA)which launched a bit later is implicated in
attacks against Twitter, Voice of America (after they supported Iran’s
Green movement), and Iranian Resistance sites (prior to the 2013 Iranian
elections).
The ICA operates on behalf of the militant Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC), which controls most of the Iranian economy and is
only answerable to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The IRGC runs a cyber warfare programme that employed about 2,400
professional hackers, as of 2008, and supports independent hacker groups
such as Ashiyane and the ICA.
The attacks had gone beyond defacements and hijacking by 2012. Now
Iran’s hackers destroyed data, introduced malware and shut down critical
websites.
The hid behind their screennames- designed to distance themselves
from the Regime by resembling other hackers who work for human rights-
and sabotaged the Saudi Aramco oil company, Qatar’s RasGas, the Las
Vegas Sands Corporation, several major US banks, the Bowman Avenue Dam
in New York, and many others.
Why? The reasons for the attacks were either extracting a ransom,
payback for perceived action against the Regime, or to cause panic.
There are also at least two groups that currently commit cyber
espionage for the Iranian Regime. Named by cyber security research firm
FireEye, Advanced Persistent Threat 33 targets the petrochemical,
defence and aviation industries, while Advanced Persistent Threat 34
targets the financial, energy, telecom and chemical industries.
Worse still, the Reime may be getting help from foreign entities.
Peter Hoekstra, former chair of the House’s Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence, said that he sees links to Russia in this rapid growth
in Iran’s cyber-attacks. Matthew McInnis, a resident fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute, also believes this.
Dorothy Denning, an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis, wrote
on Scientific American: “Iran may view cyber warfare as a means of
overcoming its military disadvantage compared to the U.S. To that end,
it will likely continue to improve its cyber capabilities. Containing
Iran’s cyber warfare program would likely be even more challenging than
containing its nuclear program. Computer code is easy to conceal, copy
and distribute, making it extremely difficult to enforce controls placed
on cyber weapons. That leaves cyber security and cyber deterrence as
America’s best options for defending against the Iranian cyber threat.”
هیچ نظری موجود نیست:
ارسال یک نظر