What’s Next for Iran’s Cyber Actors? – By Patrick Tucker (Defense One) / Jan 3 2020
The country has grown as a talented, and destructive, network threat over the last several years.
Expect more network-enabled spying and possibly destructive cyber attacks in the wake of the killing of one of Iran’s most important military commanders, experts said.
“We will probably see an uptick in espionage, primarily focused on government systems, as Iranian actors seek to gather intelligence and better understand the dynamic geopolitical environment. We also anticipate disruptive and destructive cyberattacks against the private sphere,” said John Hultquist, director of Intelligence Analysis at FireEye, in a Friday statement.
Like a lot of smaller state actors, Iran has been growing its cyber capacity over the last several years. Clumsy distributed-denial-of-service attacks and website defacements in 2009 led four years later to the manipulation of search query commands in an attack on the Navy Marine Corps Intranet. In 2013, an Iranian national allegedly breached the control system of a dam in Rye, New York. Two years after that, Iran actors used wiper malware to delete files from some 35,000 computers owned by Saudi Aramco, one of the most disruptive attacks to date.
Iranian cyber actions spiked ahead of the 2015 signing of the multinational deal that limited Iran’s nuclear activities. Targets included U.S. financial organizations and even the Sands casino in Las Vegas. Owned by outspoken conservative Sheldon Adelson, who had argued publicly against the deal, the casino’s networks were wiped clean, doing a reported $40 million in damage.
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