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US 'launched cyber-attack on Iran weapons systems'
- ncmncm 7y agoJoke's on the US: Iran has no need for its weapons systems. They have no enemies except the US, which prefers to wage economic war, aside from its "death from the sky" drones. (No, Israel doesn't count. That's just a grudge.)
- enraged_camel 7y agoSaudi Arabia is their arch-nemesis.
- throwaway872615 7y agoSimplistically, maybe. In reality their arch-nemesis is "Gharbzadegi". The external ones merely strengthen them. Wikipedia: Gharbzadegi (Persian: غرب زدگی) is a pejorative Persian term variously translated as ‘Westernized’, ‘West-struck-ness’[1], ‘Westoxification’, ‘Westitis’, ‘Euromania’, or ‘Occidentosis’.
- flyinglizard 7y agoHuh? Iran is involved in at least four armed conflicts at the moment.
- ncmncm 7y agoThey send soldiers around, but nobody is attacking Iran at its border that I know of.
- Udik 7y agoWikipedia lists two: Syria civil war and Iraq civil war. In both instances in cooperation with the legitimate goverment of the nation, and against ISIL.
- flyinglizard 7y agoThey are sponsoring the Houthis in Yemen, Hizbollah in Lebanon and some of the Palestinian organizations in Gaza (Islamic Jihad if I’m not mistaken). I’m not even counting the allegations EU nations made against Iran for attempted terrorism in EU mainland.
- Udik 7y agoSponsoring. So you count USA as participant in the Yemen war, in the Gaza blockade and in the illegal occupation of Palestine? They're sponsoring Israel and Saudi Arabia and supplying them with money and weapons.
- ceejayoz 7y ago> So you count USA as participant in the Yemen war, in the Gaza blockade and in the illegal occupation of Palestine? Absolutely, yes. Why would you not?
- flyinglizard 7y agoIsrael is not controlled by the USA to the extent Hizbollah is controlled by Iran. Hizbollah answers to the IRGC and Qassem Suleimani. So do various Iraqi militias. Neither Israel or Saudi Arabia are proxies for the USA. Supported - yes, but they are not used as a strategic deterrent which operates on American command (US has enough power projection to do it by itself).
- darkpuma 7y agoIn the 80s when they were at war with Iraq, the CIA assisted the Iraqis in dropping poison gas on Iranian civilians. Even if America were Iran's only enemy, America has a history of supporting other nations in wars against Iran. So Iran plainly still has an interest in putting up a capable defense against a conventional military attack.
- okusername 7y agoIs that smart? Isn't that just a free pentest for Iran, so they can close some holes?
- gruez 7y agoOr say you launched a cyber attack, but really you didn't, then they waste their time looking for non-existent backdoors. Considering the NSA has some pretty deep implants (uefi level, hard drive firmware level, iot/embedded) that can pass through airgaps (see: stuxnet), it'll be quite expensive to do a full sweep.
- sapilla 7y agoIf they do manage a full sweep, the world is one step closer to spyware-free consumer hardware ^^
- SiempreViernes 7y agoWell the system has to go down, if the Iranians can keep shooting missiles just fine there is no point to it.
- incompatible 7y agoThey wouldn't have done it for nothing. If there's any truth in it, presumably it would have been part of a wider US attack, which Trump supposedly called off at the last minute.
- AsyncAwait 7y agoTrump calling the attack off was a surprisingly sober call on his part. Killing Iranians because an unmanned drone was attacked, that at best flew purposefully extremely close to Iran's border, at worst actually crossed into it, would be an extremely unequal response and a major escalation. I imagine part of the reason they shot it down is because the rhetoric coming from Washington is such, that an attack could come at any moment and is hard for the Iranians to tell if this is it or not, (which I think is part of the U.S. tactic to provoke them to do something stupid). The U.S. would not tolerate Chinese drones off its coast either.
- 1337cyb3rD00D 7y agoOn some level, you have to figure any country operating in an atmosphere of sustained, overt adversity would have long since divested themselves from any amount of trust placed in areas of technology that one might consider "cyber" oriented.
- berkut 7y agoProbably using a continuation of the Suter program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suter_(computer_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suter_(computer_program)
- jnurmine 7y agoAfter some googling for what Suter is, it seems to be a system which detects electronic emissions sources, compares these with the known emitters to ID them, then somehow it accesses the enemy communications network to jam/disrupt/monitor the appropriate emitters. But... I'm a bit puzzled. The implication of a Suter-style "cyber attack" (not just dumb radar jamming) is that the target military communications network is compromised enough for the attacker to intelligently DoS certain nodes in it, send bogus packets or sniff traffic. If this was the case here, then the USA basically told Iran that the Iranian infrastructure used for communicating with some of its military assets is compromised, and the USA showed how much it is compromised, too. Pointing out weak spots in your enemy's defences sounds like a somewhat strange thing to do, since the enemy will no doubt fix those omissions rather quickly. One reason I can think of was to prevent enterprising third parties from exploiting the same weak spots.
- berkut 7y agoSuter actually (or at least used to ~13 years ago) compromise the CaC / FC systems from the radar point-of-view itself as the entry-point, so it's not necessarily over or via conventional networks (i.e. TCP/IP). Older Russian tech for SAM sites and the such had microwave controllers between the different components (i.e. multi-static radar), and it was possible to intercept/gain access/control from here in a shockingly convenient way. It was essentially similar to (but via radio spectrum as opposed to light) gaining access to a police speed camera by firing light at the camera sensor, gaining control of it, and then re-programming it to either do nothing useful, or even in extreme cases take license plate pictures of police cars going under the speed limit. Sounds impossible (and likely is for my camera example), but... I imagine in the mean time more modern Russian systems are now much more hardened to this type of attack, so maybe the situation is different...
- tastroder 7y agoThere's four or five lines of pretty unsubstantiated content in there relating to a "cyber-attack" that might be relevant for HN. Besides the weird rehashing of "they're building nukes" propaganda, the linked articles https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-trumps-approval-pentagon-launched-cyber-strikes-against-iran/2019/06/22/250d3740-950d-11e9-b570-6416efdc0803_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-... and https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/politics/us-iran-cyber-attacks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/politics/us-iran-cyber... seem much more informative in that regard.
- m0zg 7y ago>> "they're building nukes" propaganda But they are building nukes. Israel shared the evidence last year. They will exceed their enrichment limit by June 27, deliberately. And they're working on (and testing) ballistic missiles as well. If you aren't building the nukes, why do you need ballistic missiles? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/world/middleeast/israel-iran-nuclear-netanyahu.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/world/middleeast/israel-i...
- miracle2k 7y agoIt's "their" enrichment limit because they agreed to an arbitrarily low one under JCPOA. If they leave the agreement after other parties did so as well, this is not evidence of a nuke program. It is merely evidence of them enriching, which you can do for non-military purposes. The evidence from the nuclear archive, which remains unreleased, seems to at best prove that they had a nuke program in the past.
- m0zg 7y agoThey denied they had it then, too. They deny it now. Seems like the "deal" was just to get their foreign accounts unblocked. I'm curious how you'll explain away their ballistic missile development and testing. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-security-missiles/iran-confirms-missile-test-in-defiance-of-u-s-idUSKBN1OA0U7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-security-missiles/ir...
- nocturnial 7y agoThere was an agreement the US pulled out of. Which part of that agreement talked about ballistic missiles? I think you are confusing two separate things. One is a nuclear capable Iran and the other is about the military projection of conventional weapons. Both are troubling but one is more acute than the other. The monitoring of Iran's nuclear program was working.
- m0zg 7y agoBallistic missiles are not "conventional weapons". And Iran is quite a large country, so I wouldn't be so sure that "monitoring" was working either. Putting two and two together, _if_ Iran is still developing nuclear weapons in secret (probability of which is far above zero), they're closer than ever to "projecting" those weapons in the general direction of Israel and other allies in the region, and eventually at the US. All they'd need to do is swap out a dummy warhead with a real one.
- discordance 7y agoI wonder how effective they were after the learnings Iran would have made after Stuxnet
- an-allen 7y agoThere are a few things that are strange about this. Number 1 - it was weapons systems they attacked, so I'm going to assume you reach those through microwave somehow. If thats the case, simply storing your weapons in a faraday cage until you are ready to use them is a pretty effective countermeasure? Secondly, why would you publicise you engaged in a bit of cyber warfare - particularly successful cyber warfare. This literally notifies the enemy to upgrade/fix/patch/take counter measures, solidifies their defenses, and provides a clear aggressor. Amateur hour from the CISA... or perhaps someone needs a public win to justify another round of funding increases... Oh look.. https://www.cyberscoop.com/house-bill-boost-cisa-funding-335-million/ https://www.cyberscoop.com/house-bill-boost-cisa-funding-335... 335 Million Dollars! Such a corrupt system.
- varjag 7y agoYou can't really store your air defense network in a faraday cage. The second point is not surprising: Trump needed something after caving to Iran's show of force. Operational and effectiveness concerns are secondary, it's not an administration renowned for long term planning.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoBecause Trump felt not starting a war looked bad for him, so he published whatever attack he had on hand to prove he’s still a stronk man, that’s my guess anyway. The hope with any attack is that its disruptive effects outweigh the intelligence your adversary gainsfrom observing your actions.
- zaroth 7y agoThe implication is that, like with Stuxnet, the attack caused permanent or difficult to repair damage to the systems. Similar to the Iranian attack against Saudi Arabia banks where 30,000 desktops were encrypted and backup data was specifically targeted. As far as providing a “clear aggressor” well there purpose was retaliatory for a drone which Iran admitted that they shot down.
- pwodhouse 7y ago
- lota-putty 7y agoMajoritarianism. People will talk pro-USA if they're in majority here.
- quotz 7y agoTo europeans its quite strange how easily the US would go to war... I guess this is a product of big oil and weapon lobbying, because theyre the only ones that benefit from this
- mynameishere 7y agoYeah, right. Try Israel and (to a much smaller degree) the Kingdom.
- quotz 7y agoTo be honest, Israel is very very aggressive in terms of warfare and they’re only doing it so that they take more land... On the other hand the UK is just a puppet of USA... and this is coming from someone who lives in UK
- noir_lord 7y agoWe are very definitely a puppet in some matters to the US and it's only going to get worse once we exit the EU. Our politicians don't have the backbone to stand up to the US and the ones that might are obliterated by the press (not a Corbyn fan but it's interesting to read what the press says and then what he actually said just to see how blatant it is). Honestly I'm in favour of the UK taking a much lesser role in international affairs, as a second rate power we simply shouldn't be rattling around the place like it's the 19th century - We should be more like a Germany or Italy and less like US-lite.
- darkpuma 7y ago> "To be honest, Israel is very very aggressive in terms of warfare and they’re only doing it so that they take more land..." Israel has a few motivations, land is just one of them. Whether it's land, oil, distracting the plebeians or something else, for the most part it boils down to power.
- wbl 7y agoYou might want to look again at 1973 or the Southern Lebanon wars. Israel has been very restrained compared to what the US would do if Mexico was shelling a border town now and again.
- mpweiher 7y agoThe part I don’t get is the “in retaliation for shooting down a drone”. If the drone was operating over Iranian territory, Iran is well within their rights to shoot it down. What would the US do with an Iranian drone operating over US territory? Over sensitive military sites?
- onewhonknocks 7y agoIf.
- hacknat 7y agoPublicizing a low level attack on a weapons system is a ham fisted attempt at ratcheting, and it will probably work. I think it’s fairly likely we end up in a war with Iran, since Bolton has pretty much said that’s what he wants.
- bin0 7y agoIt's about darn time. Regardless of the whole "nuke" situation, Iran has been a thorn in the side of companies for years. Between them and North Korea, civilian operations are regularly crippled and data stolen. I even know a company that got ransomware twice, both times from the North Koreans (company paid the first time, so they went back after them). Most of the time, companies don't widely disclose this (except to affected parties), so you don't hear about it, but it's very much out there and widespread (according to the FBI agents involved in this case and what I have heard). China and Russia do it too. The FBI classifies such things as acts of terror, yet we have done nothing to protect our own companies. If Iran wants to keep attacking our nation to compensate for lost oil money, it is about time we start crippling their infrastructure until they simply have no way to send a packet to the outside world.