American officials and corporate security experts examining a new wave ofpotentially destructive computer attacks striking American corporations, especially energy firms, say they have tracked the attacks back to Iran.
The targets have included several American oil, gas and electricity companies, which government officials have refused to identify. The goal is not espionage, they say, but sabotage. Government officials describe the attacks as probes looking for ways to seize control of critical processing systems.
Investigators began looking at the attacks several months ago, and when the Department of Homeland Security issued a vaguely worded warning this month, a government official told The New York Times that “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.”
They said the evidence was not specific enough to conclude with confidence that the attacks were state-sponsored, but control over the Internet is so centralized in Iran that they said it was hard to imagine the attacks being done without government knowledge. (emphasis added)
“mitigating threats in cyberspace, whether theft of intellectual property or intrusions against our critical infrastructure” was a governmentwide initiative and that the United States would consider “all of the measures at its disposal — from diplomatic to law enforcement to economic — when determining how to protect our nation, allies, partners, and interests in cyberspace.”
The Obama administration has been focused on Iran because the attacks have given the Iranian government a way to retaliate for tightened economic sanctions against it, and for the American and Israeli program that aimed similar attacks, using a virus known as Stuxnet, on the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.
That effort, code-named Olympic Games, slowed Iran’s progress for months, but also prompted it to create what Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps calls a cyber corps to defend the country.
