As the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran reaches the six-month mark, the Islamic Republic retains dangerous options to impose even higher costs on its militarily superior foes. One tactic raises particular concern among former officials and analysts. At a time when Iran has inflicted billions of dollars of damage in its missile and drone attacks against regional military sites and infrastructure and upended global energy markets with its throttling of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a dedicated Iranian cyber campaign could strike at the heart of the U.S. and potentially prove even more disruptive to both national security and everyday life.
Recent reports have already linked Iran to hacks in July that shut down a power plant in the United Kingdom and up to 30 water systems across the U.S. "Cyber is tailor-made for Iran’s asymmetric playbook," Frank Cilluffo, a former Department of Homeland Security official who played a lead role in the White House's immediate post-9/11 security overhaul, told Newsweek. "Tehran does not need to match the United States plane for plane or ship for ship," Cilluffo, now director of Auburn University's McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, said.
"It can look for softer seams in our economy and critical infrastructure, impose costs far from the battlefield, and create uncertainty about when and where the next shoe may drop." Since the start of the conflict, Iran has already displayed the capacity to supplement its attacks on military and trade logistics with targeting data centers in the Persian Gulf region that serve a similarly crucial role. In the words of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spokesperson Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi during a conference on Monday, "when we destroy an Amazon data center in Bahrain, it does not mean we destroy a company or a complex, it means that we have destroyed and shattered the brain of the operations processor." Cilluffo called this strategy "particularly instructive," as it demonstrated Tehran's awareness of how "data centers are no longer simply commercial facilities, they are increasingly the backbone of our economies, AI capabilities and, in some cases, national security." An even more dire scenario he pointed out could see Iran combine its kinetic drone and missile capabilities with an added cyber component, potentially even artificial intelligence, to create simultaneous pressure across physical and digital targets. Even "a limited disruption," Cilluffo warned, "can be exaggerated and amplified through disinformation and social media to create the perception of a much larger attack." "An adversary does not have to destroy critical infrastructure to achieve strategic effect.
It can turn a tactical disruption into outsized economic, psychological and political consequences," he said. "The mistake would be to think of an Iranian cyberattack as something separate from a wider conflict. Tehran has spent decades learning how to operate asymmetrically across domains," he added.
"Cyber gives it another means to reach beyond the battlefield and bring the consequences of a conflict directly to the homeland." While not traditionally viewed as having access to the same resources or capabilities as top U.S. rivals China and Russia, both of whom have also been implicated in scores of cyber operations carried out against the U.S., Iran has a long history engaging in battle on this front. Tehran has also been a frequent target of cyber infiltration, with one of the first major instances being the infamous Stuxnet computer worm that swept through and degraded or destroyed thousands of systems tied to Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities in late 2009. The disastrous episode served as an impetus for Iran to develop and hone its own cyber prowess.
"Iran has been building their capabilities ever since being on the receiving end of the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet operation, nearly 15 years ago," Jason Healey, a founding member of the White House's Office of the National Cyber Director and the world's first-ever cyber command, Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense, told Newsweek. In 2012, then-Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, who was later killed on the first day of the ongoing war after Israel allegedly hacked traffic and CCTV cameras to track leadership movements, ordered the establishment of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace. And by 2015, the IRGC had formed its own Cybersecurity Command, though the elite force had previously pursued cyber activities through its Center to Investigate Organized Crimes.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
