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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?
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
- 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...
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
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.
...and doing no good.
The Stuxnet and Flame malware payloads were not just unleashed on the open Internet to find their way to Iran. The infection pattern of both of them indicates that they are targeted...and that means delivery via geographic means. In other words, human assets with hands on keyboards, and no degree of network separation has any effect on that. In fact, airgapping a network actually reduces your ability to fight against the consequences of an attack in many ways. (Ask anyone who's had to clean up an infection that got onto an airgapped network via an infected laptop.) Now granted, with regard to Flame, if there's no way to call home, there's no way to exfiltrate data using a direct network connection. But that doesn't mean that an attacker can't build themselves a nice nest egg of data on a hard drive to take with them.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
And as a "side benefit", many Iranian people previously entrusted with internet access can no longer see independent (non-censored_ information.