Cyberattacks: Major Iranian Threat
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon has been the subject of much debate this election season, but the presidential candidates rarely discuss the most imminent danger Iran poses to the United States: cyberwarfare.
Iran is believed to be behind a slew of massive attacks in September that took down a string of U.S. banks’ websites. The country is also thought to have launched a devastating cyber time bomb on Saudi Oil company Aramco in August and to have coordinated a similar attack on Qatar’s RasGas, an Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500) subsidiary.
The bank attacks were 10 to 20 times bigger than a typical denial of service attack, and doubled the previous record for traffic maliciously directed at a particular site, according to CrowdStrike, a security firm that investigated the attacks. The Aramco attack, set to go off on an Islamic holy night, unleashed a virus that destroyed about 30,000 corporate computers — three-quarters of the company’s PCs.
It’s a show of muscle the United States and its allies are unaccustomed to seeing from Iran. Cyberespionage and online identity theft are common tactics of Russian mafiosos and Chinese hackers, but Iran is relatively new to this playing field. After a series of painful economic sanctions levied on the country by the United States and Europe, cybersecurity experts say they’re not surprised that Iran is fighting back.
“Iran is trying to demonstrate that it has a capability to disrupt life in the West,” said Roger Cressey, senior vice president at security consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton. “Its argument is: ‘Whatever you in the West may do to us, know that it will not be a pain-free operation.'”
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