Iranian armed forces to establish cyber defense headquarters
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
Tabriz, July 19, IRNA -- Deputy Chief of Staff in Mobilization Force and Defense Culture Affairs Brigadier Seyyed Mas’oud Jazayeri here Wednesday evening informed about near future establishment of armed forces cyber defense headquarters.
Brigadier Jazayeri who was speaking with IRNA at the end of a meeting with East Azarbaijan province armed forces’ inspection officers, added, “That headquarters would be commissioned to design and adopt comprehensive approaches in line with cultural onslaught of the enemies.”
He pointed out that the new HQ of the armed forces would have interactions with other cultural centers of the country, adding, “Subordinate soft war centers at various levels of the armed forces, too, would be activated.”
Jazayeri said that the cultural departments of the armed forces have already launched vast scale programs to counter the psychological war of the enemies, arguing, “The Islamic Republic of Iran has had noticeable growth in cyber field and parallel with that the country’s soft war capability has improved significantly.”
He warned about the psychological campaign of the enemies, but meanwhile noted, “The effect of the satellite and media networks of the enemies on the hearts and minds of the Iranian young generation has not been noticeable, and major part of it is the aggrandizing and implications of the enemies.”
The top military commander said that surveying the cultural, political and social status of East Azerbaijan province was the objective of his visit of Tabriz, adding, “Keeping in mind the rich cultural and religious background of the people in this region of Iran and the already launched cultural and social activities at the level of provincial armed forces and the current status of the armed forces is at a satisfactory level.
In an unsurprising and yet wholly unsettling twist, it was recently revealed that Stuxnet — the virus that sabotaged part of the Iranian uranium enrichment program — was developed by the US and Israeli governments, and sanctioned by the US President Obama himself.
According to numerous American, European, and Israeli officials, Stuxnet was part of Olympics Games, a secret project begun by the Bush administration. Shortly after Obama became president, he sped up Olympic Games and ordered “increasingly sophisticated (cyber) attacks” on Iranian infrastructure.
When the Stuxnet was deployed in 2009 by the US and Israel, it was originally designed to stay within Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant, damaging the Siemens industrial equipment — but a programming error resulted in the worm spreading across the internet, and the eventual discovery by security companies such as Symantec and Kaspersky. According to The New York Times, upon hearing that the worm had escaped, Obama asked his national security team, “Should we shut this thing down?” But with evidence that the worm was still damaging the Iranian nuclear program, a new version of Stuxnet was released and Olympic Games continued.
While everyone always assumed that a governmental agency was behind the Stuxnet — the worm is one of the most complex pieces of malware ever discovered, and it only targets a very specific software and hardware (the Iranian uranium enrichment machines) — it’s a little bit humbling to learn that the US president was directly responsible for its spread.
To put this into perspective, not only is this the first ever confirmed case of governmental cyberwarfare — it’s a virtual a guarantee that a bunch of nations now have a cyberwarfare department. While the Chinese government never owned up to the cyber attacks on US tech companies in January 2010, we can only assume that this was the work of the Chinese equivalent of Olympic Games. Through Israel’s involvement in Stuxnet, we can assume that it has a cyberwar group as well. The NYT also sourced information from European officials, too — so we can probably infer that at least the major EU nations have similar cyber security initiatives.
Does this mean that these countries are actually conducting regular cyber attacks, though? Certainly! In a world where Iran’s nuclear enrichment factory is connected to the internet, you can be damn sure that at least the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are keeping tabs on the rest of the world’s digital infrastructure. In this sense, cyber attacks (and cyber security) is just part and parcel of national defense. If China is regularly plundering other countries for intellectual property — modern day industrial espionage — then the US must defend itself, and even strike back to keep the status quo.
Does this mean that the world is on the cusp of full-scale cyberwar? That is unlikely. A full-on cyber attack designed to cripple a nation’s infrastructure would be followed by physical, conventional warfare — and for the moment at least, the analysts don’t think anyone is quite ready to start World War III.
Courtesy: www.extremetech.com for the background
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