Iranian Hackers Compromised Airlines, Critical Infrastructure Companies

itwbennett writes: For the past two years, a team of Iranian hackers has compromised computers and networks belonging to over 50 organizations in 16 countries, including airlines, defense contractors, universities, military installations, hospitals, airports, telecommunications firms, government agencies, and energy and gas companies, researchers from IT security firm Cylance said in an extensive report released Tuesday (PDF). According to the report, "ten of these victims are headquartered in the U.S. and include a major airline, a medical university, an energy company specializing in natural gas production, an automobile manufacturer, a large defense contractor, and a major military installation."

Comments

ha fucking ha

[Anonymous Coward]

So Stuxnet; what a fucking good idea. Let's all start a computer virus arms war. No blowback from that for first world computer dominated societies. No sir; none at all.

OTOH; at least the OpenBSD and SELinux guys may finally get a bit of attention; if only we can find some non compromised hardware to run it on.

Re:What goes around comes around

[Livius]

Iran, like Cuba, decided to stop being treated like a colony.

That's so challenging to the American world view that they actually become hysterical.

Who said it "started" with Stuxnet?

[s.petry]

Stuxnet/Duqu/FLAME and several other exploits were easily tracked to US 3 letter agencies and Israel. Stuxnet was the first Virus created by Government agencies (from any country) specifically intended to cause physical damage, not just perform non-destructive information gathering. Any idiot looking at the facts can make this determination.

Lets not neglect the fact that the US sponsors the largest group of black hat hackers in the world and claims "national security" when people complain about being hacked by them. I'm not talking about the porn spammers like we see out of Russia, I'm talking about people who actually cause physical, social, and financial damage to anyone and everyone including our "Allies".

Now compare what the NSA has done with what these "evil Iranian terrorist haxxors" did in terms of damage. There is no evidence that they did really anything except prove that they can behave like script kiddies. They stole a few files and some personal information, but this is what spear phishing does all the time and with much greater success than this group's 50 companies in a few years time frame. There is no evidence that they damaged anything at all, just a wild speculation which reads like typical fear mongering.

Before you ask for a citation, I'll simply point you to everything Snowden leaked. Not that empirical evidence is of any interest to you or anything...