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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
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...
I have to agree with them. Very smart move, and one that will followed by everyone
I don't think it will work, though -- a country-sized Intranet is an indefensibly large target. All it takes is one connection to the outside world, and the spooks can come right back in through that connection. In a country the size of Iran, what are the odds that some desperate/clever Iranian won't set up a satellite dish or something to get access to the outside world? And even if they don't, it wouldn't be too difficult for a spook to come in and set up one up.
I think at best this will only harm Iranians, and give the Iranian government a false sense of security.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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
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.
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.
And as a "side benefit", many Iranian people previously entrusted with internet access can no longer see independent (non-censored_ information.