Experts warn of Iranian cyber attacks on America

The author in the American "Newsweek" magazine, Fred Gutrell, warned the United States not to rely on the statement announced by Iran about the response to the killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, who stated that Iran is satisfied with the missile response that targeted two military bases in Iraq.

Gutler believes that the statement is only a way to anesthetize the United States. It is possible that Iran will increase its harassment of the United States by using its network of proxies in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. This coming November.

"I don't think Iran has ended its revenge," says John Bettman, a former expert with the Defense Intelligence Agency and a member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tehran will use it. "

Although Iran is not among the countries that pose the most threat to cyber in the world, where its software has not yet caught up with Russia and China, it is still capable of causing many unrest.

The heightened tension following the killing of Soleimani has caused growing concern among electronic experts in the United States about possible electronic attacks that might be launched by Tehran in the coming months.

Impossible targets
Farid Goutrell asserts that the most worrying cyber threat posed by Iran is that which may lead to loss of life. In this context, electronic espionage techniques or data collection can be used to monitor and target the movement of forces, ships or aircraft in the Middle East.

To carry out a targeted assassination, Iran will need to collect various intelligence tools. Malware infecting mobile phones would give it access to a host of information, including potential locations of targets in real time. Phone penetration can also provide what experts call information about that person’s “lifestyle,” that is, the areas he visits, and this can be used to predict where the target is located.

By accessing phone calls, emails, text messages and contact lists, hackers can accidentally make their target fall into the trap. "Iran has carried out many targeted killings abroad through its proxies, and possibly directly," Payman said.

The process of installing malware on mobile devices is not difficult, as the simplest way is to use "social engineering" to deceive targets and get them to disclose confidential information such as passwords. This is reminiscent of what some Russian customers did with the head of the Clinton campaign John Podesta in 2016, from In order to install malware.

Disinformation campaigns
Iran is likely to contribute to fabricating misinformation with the aim of fueling the violence. In recent months, Iranian-backed groups have used social media to exchange fake information about the US military.

One widespread allegation concerns the arrest of an Iraqi parliamentarian by the US Marines. According to Bateman, "This kind of rumor contributes to anger and feelings of mistrust towards US forces, not to mention that it incites acts of violence based on them, which is cause for concern."

Although Iran does not have a huge misleading information machine enabling it to stir up divisions, just as Russia did in the period leading up to 2016, it is expected to seek to influence the results of the 2020 elections using other means.

Iran has important groups of experienced talent in launching cyberattacks and breaching computer systems, and it is likely that this will help it find and leak sensitive information. American officials suspect that Iran was behind the 2015 attack on the Saudi Foreign Ministry.

Iran was seized once in an attempt to break into Donald Trump's election campaign. Last October, Microsoft reported that a group of hackers called "phosphorous" - believed to be linked to the Iranian government - made more than 2,700 attempts to monitor email accounts, and attacked 241 of them, including those linked to a US political campaign.

"These efforts indicated that the" phosphorous "group is strongly motivated and ready to invest a large amount of time and resources in research, along with other means to collect information," Microsoft said in a statement released in October.

On the other hand, the experts said that such a tactic is not a feature of Iran, which in the past has not shown much interest in the political election system in the United States. From Iran's point of view, there is not much difference between the policies of the two American parties.

Easy targets
The writer stated that disrupting the functioning of companies is one of Iran's most important goals and within the limits of its current cyber capabilities. Although Iran will not be able to make significant progress with technology giants such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, there are countless other organizations exposed to piracy, including many banks, chemical plants, oil refineries, pharmaceutical companies, water treatment plans and the electrical network .

It is possible that Iran has been installing malware in such organizations over the past decade, and it has been suppressing it for many years until the right moment. "This tactic is called" battlefield preparation, where you wait like sleeper cells until you have three or four chemical plants and two power plants, and then you start implementing your plan, "said Stephen Belovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University in New York. .

The writer pointed out that this malicious software is supposed to be activated based on a signal from Iran, then go ahead with a coordinated cyber attack, and this attack can take many forms. In a power plant, malware can cause the turbines to rotate irregularly until they cause it to collapse. And malware in a drug company can change the doses of pimples released from the factory line, causing panic.

Experts have indicated that it is unlikely that Iran will have the ability to wage a cyber war that leads to huge human losses; although it may use malware to destroy power stations, it is possible that Iran will not be able to cause damage on a large scale in the prolonged disruption of the American electrical network.

Moreover, Iran's engineers are unlikely to emulate the Stuxnet malware; since this weapon requires more than just specialized programming, it has required an enormous amount of intelligence to collect how to release the virus onto microcomputer chips, which Iranian nuclear engineers were integrating them into their centrifuges.