Iran seeks to boost corps of web watchers

MrRelevant · Jan 20, 2011

Iran seeks to boost corps of web watchers

(AP) 1 day ago

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) Iran's top police chief envisions a new beat for his forces: patrolling cyberspace.

"There is no time to wait," Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam said last week at the opening of a new police headquarters in the Shiite seminary city of Qom. "We will have cyber police all over Iran."

The first web watchdog squads are planned in Tehran this month another step in Iran's rapidly expanding focus on the digital world as cyber warfare and online sleuthing take greater prominence with the Pentagon's new Cyber Command and the secrets spilled to WikiLeaks.

For Iranian authorities, mastering the intricacies of the web is seen as critical on two fronts: an offensive weapon against political opposition and a defensive shield to thwart cyber-attacks such as the Stuxnet computer worm that Iran said was aimed at sabotaging its uranium enrichment program.

It's part of what the Islamic Republic calls its "soft war" which includes trying to curb Western cultural influences and gaining the upper hand in cyberspace against web-literate opposition groups.

But some experts question Iran's capabilities in the constantly evolving Net. They say Iran is hampered by the lack of homegrown computer innovation and its struggle to find competent programmers and hackers willing to work for the state.

"Without a robust domestic computer industry, it's doubtful Iran could develop significant cyber capabilities," said Derek Reveron, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island.

Iran, however, appears to be investing significant resources to boost its cyber corps.

The Revolutionary Guard Iran's military-industrial powerhouse is believed linked to the secretive "Cyber Army" that emerged as a counter punch against the onslaught of opposition websites and blogs after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

Some Iranian lawmakers are now reportedly seeking a sharp boost in funding and recruitment to bring more hackers into the Revolutionary Guards paramilitary Basij corps, which is far better known for its storm trooper role against protesters.

The suspected fingerprints of the Cyber Army have already turned up in defacements against Twitter, the Chinese search engine Baidu and TechCrunch Europe, a blog covering web startups and related news.

The Cyber Army also has been blamed for blocking reformist sites and even hacking into the website of Farsi1, a popular television channel based in Dubai and owned by an Afghan media tycoon and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
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"There is no time to wait," Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam said last week at the opening of a new police headquarters in the Shiite seminary city of Qom. "We will have cyber police all over Iran."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap...UYOnqw?docId=ef039f80e917425bacf30c06d2a8afec

Pursuing the cessation of free speech and the stifling of free thought with zeal and excitement,thats the IRGC we all know and love. It looks like preparations for the next few years election cycles are in full effect.

Roadvirus · Jan 21, 2011

The Iranian opposition will always find a way to thwart the Internet Cops. The leadership of Iran should just do the entire world a favor and collapse. It's inevitable. Resistance is futile.

waltky · Sep 25, 2011

Stuxnet anniversary...

From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later
September 22, 2011 - Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that attacked and damaged an Iranian nuclear facility, has opened a Pandora's box of cyberwar, says the man who uncovered it. A Q&A about the potential threats.

One year ago a malicious software program called Stuxnet exploded onto the world stage as the first publicly confirmed cyber superweapon a digital guided missile that could emerge from cyber space to destroy a physical target in the real world. It took Ralph Langner about a month to figure that out. While Symantec, the big antivirus company, and other experts pored over Stuxnet's inner workings, it was Mr. Langner, a industrial control systems security expert in Hamburg, who deciphered and tested pieces of Stuxnet's "payload" code in his lab and declared it a military-grade cyberweapon aimed at Iran's nuclear facilities.

Days later, he and other experts refined that assessment, agreeing Stuxnet was specifically after Iran's gas centrifuge nuclear fuel-enrichment program at Natanz. After infiltrating Natanz's industrial-control systems, Stuxnet automatically ordered subsystems operating the centrifuge motors to spin too fast and make them fly apart, Langner says. At the same time, Stuxnet made it appear random breakdowns were responsible so plant operators would not realize a nasty software weapon was behind it.

In the end, Stuxnet may have set back Iran's nuclear ambitions by years. But it also could prove a Pyrrhic victory for its still-unknown creator a sophisticated cyberweapons nation state that Langner argues could be the US or Israel. Like the Hiroshima bomb, Stuxnet demonstrated for the first time a dangerous capability in this case to hackers, cybercrime gangs, and new cyberweapons states, he says in an interview. With Stuxnet as a "blueprint" downloadable from the Internet, he says, "any dumb hacker" can now figure out how to build and sell cyberweapons to any hacktivist or terrorist who wants "to put the lights out" in a US city or "release a toxic gas cloud."

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waltky · Oct 19, 2011

New Stuxnet variant...

'Son of Stuxnet' virus could be used to attack critical computers worldwide
A powerful new computer virus that some are calling the "Son of Stuxnet" has been discovered, and researchers are concerned about its potential for attacking critical infrastructure computers around the world.

The mysterious Stuxnet worm -- perhaps the most powerful ever created -- managed to infiltrate computer systems in Iran and do damage to that nation's nuclear research program. The new worm, dubbed Duqu, has no such targeted purpose. But it shares so much code with the original Stuxnet that researchers at Symantec Corp. say it must either have been created by the same group that authored Stuxnet, or by a group that somehow managed to obtain Stuxnet's source code. Either way, Duqu's authors are brilliant, and mean business, said Symantec's Vikrum Thakur. "There is a common trait among the (computers) being attacked," he said. "They involve industrial command and control systems."

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Symantec speculates that Duqu is merely gathering intelligence as a precursor to a future industrial-strength attack on infrastructure computers. Duqu's purpose is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party, Symantec said in an announcement. The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility. At the moment, Duqu only creates a back door into infected systems, connecting them to a command computer somewhere in India. No marching orders have yet been given, Thakur said. But those who control the machines could do virtually anything they wanted, Thakur said.

"The kinds of consequences we could see ... if the computer is told download this file, it will download the file. If the file says shut off this service, and that had an effect on a power plant or a conveyor belt, it would do that," he said. Duku is so similar to Stuxnet that F-Secure's antivirus program initially identified it as Stuxnet, said F-Secure's Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen. "Duqu's kernel driver is so similar to Stuxnet's driver that our back-end systems actually thought it was Stuxnet," he said in a Tweet. The mysterious Duku is designed to leave the back door open for precisely 36 days, and then self-destruct.

Symantec was first alerted to the existence of Duqu on Friday, when an unnamed security firm that had already worked with a Europe-based victim shared his research with the firm. Symantec researchers worked through the weekend trying to understand the virus, which they have since learned has infected industrial computers "around the globe," Thakur said. He wouldn't identify the initial victim or say how many known victims there are. Symantecs analysis shows the Duqu may have been used to surveil computers around the world as far back as December 2010.

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Talon · Oct 19, 2011

Waiting for the fascist regime's Internet Brownshirts to come running to its defense...

DutchClogCyborg · Oct 19, 2011

Seems the anti Israel members here are not good enough when they divide their time between this forum and stormfront

waltky · Oct 25, 2012

Mideast oil infrastructure under cyber attack...

Mideast cyber war endangers gulf energy
Oct. 24,`12 (UPI) -- The energy industry in the Persian Gulf is finding itself vulnerable to cyberattack.

The energy industry in the Persian Gulf, which supplies more than one-third of the world's oil supplies and much of its natural gas, is finding itself vulnerable to cyberattack, a form of warfare the United States, Israel and Iran are increasingly using. "Rising regional political tensions and a flurry of recent cyberattacks have raised fears about the growing use of viruses to target critical national infrastructure in the Middle East," the Financial Times warned.

The dangers to the energy industry in a strategic region are growing all the time as the key protagonists in the cyberspace develop increasingly effective and potentially destructive viruses, energy specialists say. These dangers were dramatically underlined in recent weeks with cyberattacks on Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state oil monopoly and the world's leading producer, and RasGas, a joint venture between Exxon Mobil of the United States and state-owned Qatar Petroleum, in the neighboring gas-rich emirate of Qatar.

The discovery in September of a highly infectious variant of the W32.Flame virus that was used in a recent cyberattack on Iran's national oil infrastructure, already battered by ever-tightening U.S. and European sanctions, has caused alarm about the effects of future attacks. The new variant has been dubbed Mini-Flame and has been detected in Iran and Sudan.

Another virus, an espionage malware known as Gauss was allegedly used by the United States and Israel to attack Lebanon's banking system, suspected of laundering money for Iran and Hezbollah, its powerful Lebanese proxy, as well as the embattled Syrian regime. Gauss was used in strikes against targets in the Palestinian territories and Iran. "If Flame and Gauss were massive cyberespionage operations, infecting thousands of users, then Mini-Flame is a high-precision, surgical attack tool," says Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow IT security company.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Business_News/En...gulf-energy/UPI-67341351102378/#ixzz2AHsw01w8
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mutmekep · Oct 25, 2012

Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam has no idea how the internet works.

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