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Iranian State Goes Offline To Avoid Cyber-Attacks
DavidGilbert99 writes "The Iranian minister for telecommunication has said that the government will be taking key ministries and state agencies offline in the next month to protect sensitive information from cyber-attacks. However this move is just the initial step in an 18 month plan to take the country off the world wide web, and replace it with a state-controlled intranet. From the article: 'The US began offensive cyber-attacks against Iran during the presidency of George W. Bush when the Olympics Games project was founded. Out of this was [born] the Stuxnet cyber-weapon, which was designed to specifically target the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in Iran.'"
... chucking the baby out with the bathwater.
I feel sorry for the Iranian people, who by-and-large, are reasonably normal, but are stuck with a crap theocratic government through little fault of their own.
Will BP and their friends ever be held responsible for the damage they've done to world peace in the name of profit for their shareholders?
Probably a lot cheaper than kajillions of $$$ spent on cyber defense...
Tough break for the Iranian people, but like other countries with draconian Internet access policies I suspect that a way will be found. As Cuba's government found out; you should never underestimate the ability of large numbers of USB sticks gifted by benefactors to facilitate the free flow of restricted information; it just takes a little longer, that's all. For the rest of us though, this is excellent news. When the next cyber-weapon gets loose on the the Iranian "Halal-net", or whatever the regime is referring to it as this week, we can sleep easy knowing that our industrial control systems are already air-gapped from the Iranian ones. With that element of risk removed, I suspect the next attack on Iranian infrastructure probably isn't going to be quite so "restrained" as the last few have been.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The US began offensive cyber-attacks against Iran during the presidency of George W. Bush when the Olympics Games project was founded.
Gee, the IOC is going to be cross beyond compare for this. It's their trademark! You can't even claim that this activity belongs to a non-competing field, since both this and the IOC activities are about profiting from being generally sleazy. See you in court.
Ezekiel 23:20
I have to agree with them. Very smart move, and one that will followed by everyone, except of course "Common Wealth". And that is the naked truth, only an idiot would allow a foreign government (USA with their monopoly over key server services) to have such an useful tool for propagating their ideas and policy. Soon, thanks to USA corrupted government, every country will have its own intranet. And that actually would be very good idea.
Better censorship and surveillance.
Remember, this is the country "in which there are no gay people".
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Even if it is just the excuse they're going to use in order to cut off a widely used means of communication, it's hard to argue against the reasoning. If they were going to stop at taking government facilities off the Internet and move them to a closed network, I'd even believe it really is about protecting themselves from foreign governments launching cyber attacks. I'm not saying this wouldn't have happened anyway, but they do have a great argument against people who see it for what it almost certainly is: a way to better control and monitor communications nationwide.
- will isolate not only the people, but those Iranians working on science and technology, which will slow down their progress dramatically. Can't have it both ways...
Why does the US or any gov. allow key systems to be on the WWW? I'm often baffled when I read stories of a key system going down because it was hacked, or ddos, or virus, or etc... Take the power grid and missle defense systems. Why would those computers need net access? A closed net yes. But when you read that people working there are surfing porn you know full well this is a wide open access. So what benefit can outweigh this security risk?
Does this clueless evil troglodyte think cutting the routers at the border is going to do anything to stop the pwning of his puny infrastructure?
Iranian prisoners^W citizens: time to take this putz and the whole putrid middle ages mullahtocracy out. With extreme prejudice.
Walk over Iranian border with virus laden USB key, plug into Iranian Internet and reinfect at will. Has the added benefit that Iranian intranet, being reasonably isolated from the outside world, won't infect computers on the real internet as often.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
While the CIA has a pretty terrible track record with respect to third world citizenry, one has to give credit to the ostensibly altruistic internet in a suitcase. It would be an excellent "weapon" in situations like this where the ability to connect would support a movement of the people, whether it be aligned with USA interests or not.
That would never happen, think of all of the lost profit. Multi-national corporations would have so much more logistical work to do.
The walled-garden approach only works for so long, the best scientific feats ever created were the result of multiple countries working together. I give you, the Internet!
Of course your statement about hacking Internet connected assets is kind of moot since all intelligence work leads to strengthening of security system whether they in the cyber-world or the real world. This is nothing new, will not end anytime soon, nor will it ever really change. Building your country-wide Intranet? Now we just gotta send in covert forces to login and plant microwave proxies, good luck detecting that reliably. There is always a way in, nothing is ever 100% secure.
Saying "The chance of a massive solar storm is about 12% for every decade." is misleading. Sometimes it's more likely than others. Yes, the chance, based on our knowledge, may average 12%/decade, but the chance in the next five years is not in proportion.
If you had said "The chance of a massive solar storm is about 12% for every solar activity cycle" things would have been clearer, but the current estimate is that there's a higher than usual chance this time. We don't (well, *I* don't) know enough to say that major solar storms head for the earth with any particular regularity. (After all, it's not just whether the solar storm occurs, it's also whether it emits in our direction.) The danger is definitely there, but I certainly can't estimate how serious it is.
OTOH, the previous times this has happened, we didn't have a massive electrical infrastructure in place. The next time will be a lot more devastating, even if we were to adequately prepare, a thing which we don't have a history of doing.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I feel sorry for the Iranian people, who by-and-large, are reasonably normal, but are stuck with a crap theocratic government through little fault of their own.
Not true. They have the ability to change their government, but they have decided it isn't worth the effort and lives it would take to do so.
The USA decided to change their government twice (Revolution worked, but the Civil War failed), and now has also decided apathy is much easier.
Neither group of citizens should get off pretending like they are helpless victims of their big old government. The government operates with the permission of the majority of the people in both cases.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
10 - 15 years ago I remember professors and others ranting and raving that the internet would usher in a new era of free flow of ideas around the world and because of the way the internet was designed it could not be filtered or stopped. Which given the cost of computing at the time seemed reasonable.
But by 2002 that had all changed. I remember taking a class which the professor had been teach philosophy and computers for close to 20 years at that point. He went into the theory behind "hyper linked text" and the idea and concept of what the "world wide web" originally meant to people like him. The closest thing we have to their philosophical idea today is wikipedia where you can go read an page with links to other pages about related topics/events/etc..
By that time "surfing the web" was not a web of interlinked hypertext, but was a rather linear experience. The research at the time showed this was how most peopl thought and used the web and was reflected in general web site design espcially of corporate sites and news sites. Fast forward 10 years later and now we have apps on our phones. Many of those apps rely on the underlying protocols of the internet, but most take you to a single site or service.
Back to the original point though was this idea that all information wanted to be free and would be free. To the academics the genie was out of the bottle and would never be put back in. My professor thought otherwise and that we'd see a slow march towards fragmenation as the powers that be learned to tame the beast.
Then came China who seemed to do it with the great firewall. Are the chinese 100% effective? No. But you don't have to be 100% just effective enough. Once they did it and proved it could be done other countries started erecting national filters, firewalls, and monitoring equipment.
Now China has something the Iranians do not: a billion people. That is a critical mass for a user base and something Iran doesn't have. But, if the Iranians do prove it can be done effectively, and there will be a lot of other countries watching, then it's likely we'll see the end of the internet as we know it over the next 10 - 15 years as more countries and groups will create their own private networks which they can control.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The thing is, setting up information barriers slows scientific and technical progress. This results in the country being less powerful.
China can probably get away with this. They are a large enough country that they can probably keep up with the rest of the world on their own. For anyone else, including the US, which is SMALL compared to the world, this is unlikely to work. And even China would suffer...note that their "Great Firewall" tries to be specific about what kinds of information it censors. They KNOW that the don't want to pay the price of a total break.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
One of the key hallmarks of the Internet is its resilience. As other oppressive regimes have learned the hard way, it's really, really difficult to censor the Internet. All it takes is a few gutsy people (who are never in short supply) to provide links to the outside world, and there goes the Intranet firewall. I'll bet that even elements within the Iranian government will find the lure of the Internet too powerful to resist. Iran won't be able to close off the Internet, any more than the Soviet Union could censor faxes during the Cold War.
So they went for the Battlestar Galactica solution: no networked computers. I can't say I blame them.
I doubt China could do this.
The internet is such a huge facilitator of commerce it would be commercial suicide to cut it off completely.
Want to send a picture, better hope the black and white fax from the 10 year old machine is good enough. Want to send a video, you're going to have to air mail it. Hell, just the cost of sending basic paperwork back and forth adds up after a while. The most expensive part will be international calling though. If you need to send an important message you would either have to call the person or next day air mail them. Not exactly easy or fun to do given the time difference.
You'll note that every country that's ever tried the whole shutdown the internet gambit isn't really thinking about commercial international trade.
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
And as a "side benefit", many Iranian people previously entrusted with internet access can no longer see independent (non-censored_ information.
I still think that China *could* do it, if they chose. You are right that it would mean that all external commercial activity would need to be done by special agents, that were authorized to connect to the regular internet. They might even need to have offices outside of China.
OTOH, it doesn't mean going back to fax machines. It just means using slightly different internet protocols. And a system that made roman letters as complicated to use as Chinese characters. (Note this is only a barrier, not a block. The blockage would come at the telecommunications interface.)
This could be done, by China. I doubt that any other country could manage it. I also doubt that China would really *want* to do this, which makes my belief untestable. But it wouldn't mean going back to old technology. Just slightly modifying the new technology in incompatible ways. Many companies have tried this in an attempt to build "walled gardens" that their customers couldn't escape from. They all failed, not for technical reasons, but for commercial ones. But China is large enough that they could probably do it. Think a version of AOL, but with more modern technology, a MUCH larger captive market, and no internal gateways to the rest of the internet. (But China is large enough that it's quite likely that it's network would be nearly as large as the rest of the internet combined.) I'll agree that there are lots of ways of doing this that wouldn't work. But they just need to avoid those, and it's not a really difficult problem if you have a government sponsoring you. Probably even Iran could manage it. But a net the size of Iran wouldn't be very worthwhile.
P.S.: Were China to do this, I expect that they would use a variant of IPv6, with guaranteed unique identifiers. Along with the characteristics that I don't like about this, I don't see anything making it infeasible, merely dangerous and unpleasant. And remember the system doesn't need to be perfect. Only good enough, and able to be improved.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
...and it's happening now in Iran...