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US Cyber-Attack on Iran, Poor Government Cybersecurity, Malvertising Campaigns
This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for July 1st 2019 with your host, Tom Eston. In this week’s episode: The US cyber-attack on Iran, the sad state of cybersecurity in the US government, and what you need to know about malvertising campaigns.
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Hi everyone, welcome to the Shared Security Weekly Blaze where we update you on the top 3 cybersecurity and privacy topics from the week. These podcasts are published every Monday and are 15 minutes or less quickly giving you “news that you can use”.
Last week the United States launched a cyberattack directed towards Iran which disabled Iranian computer systems that controlled its rocket and missile launchers. This was a response to an escalation by Iran when they shot down a unarmed US drone apparently conducting surveillance in international airspace. Iran denies those claims and states the drone was violating their airspace. The attack was carried out by the US Cyber Command acting upon orders from US President Donald Trump. This was actually the second option to strike back at Iran as the first one was to launch a missile strike against Iranian radar bases which would have resulted in human casualties. According to cybersecurity firms FireEye and Crowdstrike, there has been a recent rise in Iranian attacks on US companies and government agencies as well as critical infrastructure such as the power grid which also prompted for the US government response. This is not the first cyberattack on Iran either. You may remember back in the late 2000’s it’s believed that the US and Israel targeted the Iranian nuclear program with the Stuxnet virus which essentially disabled most of their nuclear program at the time.
I find this retaliation interesting as it seems that in more cases traditional warfare, like missile strikes, may start to be a thing of the past when cyberattacks may actually do more damage to critical infrastructure and send a more impactful message than just destroying buildings and killing a bunch of people. Of course, cyberattacks could potentially be used to kill people too. Especially ones that may be targeted towards hospitals or nuclear facilities which could malfunction due to a cyberattack. On the flip side, you may remember back in May Israel bombed a Palestinian Hamas military intelligence headquarters in retaliation for an attempted cyber-attack directed towards Israeli targets. This was the first time a nation state conducted a military strike in response to a cyber-attack. I guess it could go both ways and with the increase in cyber-attacks and capabilities that all nation states now have, it will be interesting to see how the future “cyber-war” may begin to play out.
In other US government news, Published on 6 years, 5 months ago