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The Military Government Security United States

Iran Steps Up Cyberattacks Against America (marketwatch.com) 216

An anonymous reader quotes MarketWatch: Iran has increased its offensive cyberattacks against the U.S. government and critical infrastructure as tensions have grown between the two nations, cybersecurity firms say.

In recent weeks, hackers believed to be working for the Iranian government have targeted U.S. government agencies, as well as sectors of the economy, including oil and gas, sending waves of spear-phishing emails, according to representatives of cybersecurity companies CrowdStrike and FireEye, which regularly track such activity. It was not known if any of the hackers managed to gain access to the targeted networks...

"Both sides are desperate to know what the other side is thinking," said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye. "You can absolutely expect the regime to be leveraging every tool they have available to reduce the uncertainty about what's going to happen next, about what the U.S.'s next move will be...."

According to the article, one of the phishing emails "appeared to come from the Executive Office of the President and seemed to be trying to recruit people for an economic adviser position.

"Another email was more generic and appeared to include details on updating Microsoft Outlook's global address book."
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Iran Steps Up Cyberattacks Against America

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    When security is the most important aspect of a software system, I think that OpenBSD and Rust are exactly what are needed. OpenBSD gives an ultra secure OS. Rust gives an ultra secure programming language. Security + Security = More Security. As cyber attacks become more of an issue, I predict we will see a lot more use of OpenBSD and Rust together.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      It's sad how the only comment so far (out of 14) that actually has something to do with computing is at -1.

      It just goes to show how far /. has fallen. Comments that are on-topic and polite are at -1, while comments calling for war and riddled with petty insults are modded up.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22, 2019 @05:46PM (#58806224)

    Oh wait, Stuxnet.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Aighearach ( 97333 )

      I don't want to see something silly like Stuxnet or the Gulf of Tonkin derail the opportunity for freedom for Iranian Kurdistan.

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        No worries, Turkey will handle that for you - and their NATO allies will let them.

    • Oh wait, Stuxnet.

      You misspelled 'Israel'. Also, targeting one country's nuclear weapons program is pretty different from attacking its electricity grid. Nothing that Israel did caused Iranians to go w/o power

      • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

        You misspelled 'Israel'.

        It was both the US and Israel. And if Obama wasn't murdering Iran's nuclear scientists, he knows if it was Mossad or someone else.

        Also, targeting one country's nuclear weapons program is pretty different from attacking its electricity grid.

        Iran hasn't had a nuclear weapons program. That's why this whole thing is a farce, including Obama's supposed great accomplishment of the 'Iran Deal' which came after years of illegal threats of military force and crashing their economy with sanc

        • You really fell for the notion that one of the biggest exporters of oil has a problem w/ energy? I have a bridge in Teheran that I'd like to sell you

          The real issue is Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Now, Iran does have geopolitical ambitions: in places where ethnicity helps spread its influence, like Afghanistan and Tajikistan, it uses that, but in the Arab world, since they're not Farsi, the only other tool of influence Iran can use is religious sect. Since Islam, apart from being intolerant of non-I

          • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

            You really fell for the notion that one of the biggest exporters of oil has a problem w/ energy? I have a bridge in Teheran that I'd like to sell you

            You really went with that straw man? Who said Iran has an energy shortage? They want nuclear power for the same reason the Shah started to get it from the United States: they are an oil producing nation, and having nuclear power allows them to export more oil. That and it's a matter of pride for Iran that they can have the same sort of nuclear power plants u

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22, 2019 @05:46PM (#58806226)

    And how, pray tell, do they "track such activity"? It would seem to me that in order to do so they would have to be malicious dirty hackers themselves, intercepting and tapping communications that belong to third-parties and thus dirty criminals in need of imprisonment and/or castration themselves ...

    More likely it is an American TLA (Three Letter Agency) and this is just propaganda ...

  • Seriously, is anyone gonna buy it this time? Or are we really gonna do Iraq War 2: Electric Boogaloo? It'll be much worse this time around. Sure, we'll win (they're not that big a country) but the last time we did this it cost us somewhere north of $7 trillion (by the time all costs, including interest on the debt, were factored in) and Iran is much larger than Iraq.

    And no, we won't pay for it with the oil because that money won't go anywhere near gov't coffers.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22, 2019 @07:07PM (#58806544)

      In case you haven't noticed,

      The US is a war perpetuation machine. It goes to war constantly, and never wins or loses them. It just stays forever and continues to make a mess of things just enough so they can justify staying longer.

      Why? Because some politicians, and "defense" contractors, got really drunk on the profits from WWII and have tried to keep the party going ever since. Despite the fact that the circumstances that made those profits possible no longer exist. Unfortunately the drunk politicians still refuse to realize that, and think that if they sink enough of the country's economy into it, those conditions will return.

      That, or they're just warmongers for the sake of being warmongers.

  • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Saturday June 22, 2019 @06:38PM (#58806452) Journal

    Iran was an ally of the US before we started fucking around with their government to secure oil. If you know any Iranians, you know what I mean. We should be natural allies.

    Here's a thought: Let's trade our "friendship" with Israel and Saudi Arabia for one with Iran. It'll be better for us, for them, and for the world.

    • "each side is desperate to know what the other side is thinking", or in Iran's case, to know if the USA is actually thinking at all, especially the incumbent president.

    • A nice woman from Persepolis gave a cultural presentation I attended, and she said the same thing; Persians and Americans are natural allies.

      Unfortunately, when the Ottoman Empire fell they ended up being ruled by these people from the north and east.

      And about half of Kurdistan, too, another natural ally.

      If Persia and Kurdistan were independent, it would change the whole balance of power in the region. For the better, IMO.

  • Starving IT Workers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Saturday June 22, 2019 @06:41PM (#58806458)

    Maybe instead of spending hundreds of $billions on missiles and planes each year, our national defense budget would be better spent funding security improvements for small IT departments responsible for various local government departments and strategic industries, that're likely to be attacked. The NSA could go back to helping fix bugs rather than hoard them in case they ever need to use them against 'the enemy.' R&D could be done on developing more secure programming languages and bug detection/prevention technologies. This has the upside of protecting against ransomware attacks, too.

    If 'hacking software' which automates the task of finding new exploits, and even new classes of exploits, is produced and deployed against us before the countermeasure is developed, then we could be in for a world of hurt.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I had to double check the headline because today the BBC is reporting that the US is ramping up cyber attacks on Iran [bbc.com].

      The US started the cyber cold war years ago with Struxnet, so naturally it's going to get retaliatory hacks from Iran.

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        I read that article too. Seems strange to me that the US would reveal beforehand their ability to electronically disrupt Iranian anti-air systems.

        I can only assume they launched a minor attack using a subset of their attack vectors to either lull Iran into complacency or to trick Iran into changing protocols in the hopes of introducing new vulnerabilities.

        Not that this explains why the fuck AA missiles are attached to the internet.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          A lot of Iranian equipment is Russian, so doubtless any malware samples will be shared with them too. It does seem odd.

    • by sosume ( 680416 )

      Having local IT departments responsible for securing critical infrastructure is where it all went wrong in the first place. There needs to be separate network for all utilities, completely disconnected from the internet. It shouldn't even be compatible at the physical layer and all attempts to route traffic to from that network should immediately raise alarms.

    • and empire building for the purposes of stealing natural resources. We've spent around $7 trillion on them and got basically nothing since the oil profits don't trickle down.

      And don't tell me that's not what it's for, both Trump on John Bolton are on record saying they want the oil and we only ever get on the case of dictators when they've got something we want (Iraq, Libya, "Banana" Republics and now Venezuela and Iran).
  • by melted ( 227442 ) on Saturday June 22, 2019 @06:51PM (#58806490) Homepage

    More like US warmongers step up PR to force Trump to order an escalation. It's pretty clear dude doesn't want war. So let's create a narrative to force him to have it. Bad news, media owners: he's not the kind of guy who gives a shit about the press.

    • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday June 22, 2019 @08:48PM (#58806858)

      Bad news, media owners: he's not the kind of guy who gives a shit about the press.

      You are incorrect. As a narcissist, he cares deeply about the press... but only how he is perceived. He doesn't really care if we go to war or not but he does care if he seems weak or not.

      If people on Fox News Channel started saying that he's a very weak president then I have no doubt that he would attack a nation in an attempt to dispel that image.

      You need to realize that full-blown narcissists like Trump are both deeply insecure and only interested in finding ways to receive praise and accolades.

    • I'm rather surprised he has enough of a conscience to consider whether people will be killed and how many instead of just being as inconsiderate as he is in so many other ways.
    • More like US warmongers step up PR to force Trump to order an escalation. It's pretty clear dude doesn't want war. So let's create a narrative to force him to have it.

      He doesn't know what the hell he wants.

      He understands another war in the Middle East is a bad thing so he wants to avoid that, but he also needs some way to "win" the whole Iranian storyline.

      The problem is the Nuclear deal was already a huge win and there's isn't a better deal to be had. He was maybe hoping he could just "NAFTA it", ie change a couple semi-colons and claim he's replaced the worst deal ever with the best deal ever. But that only worked with NAFTA because no one serious actually wanted NAFTA

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It seems he was ready to start a war until one of his friends at Fox called up and talked him out of it.

  • New script (Score:4, Informative)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Saturday June 22, 2019 @06:56PM (#58806504)

    At least they're being a little more creative with their manufactured pretext. For a long time they were recycling the script they used for Iraq with just the one letter changed.

  • According to the article, one of the phishing emails "appeared to come from the Executive Office of the President and seemed to be trying to recruit people for an economic adviser position.

    This e-mail was just posted online for everyone to watch out for. Here's a copy. Give it a read, and be sure to pass it on to whomever you know! Let's stay vigilant against the common enemy!

    -----

    EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
    OF IMPERIAL REPUBLIC OF THE AMERICAS
    WHITE HOUSE
    USA

    Dear worker

    May the glory of our nation be

  • by poity ( 465672 ) on Saturday June 22, 2019 @07:21PM (#58806602)

    Skepticism is "undermining the intelligence community."
    Pushing back against claims made by officials is "attacking the intelligence community."
    Remember everything that the media and anti-Trump commenters said was "helping Russia"? How do you like your own trap? All skepticism will be deemed "helping Iran" now.

    SEVENTEEN AGENCIES
    LMAO

  • Since there are no diplomatic relations between Iran and the U.S., this is simply the best way for the governments of the two nations to communicate effectively. Drop a bit of classified info here and there meant to de-escalate/escalate as desired.

It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing. -- Descartes

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