10.23.12
Had it coming
Hate to say “I told ya so,” but “I told ya so.”
The United States started the escalating arms race in cyberspace.
Now it has to live with the consequences when the property of oil flunkies in the Middle East, or the websites of American banks, are attacked.
And the New York Times has slowly come to the idea that there have been consequences from the US government’s decision to attack Iran’s infrastructure through cyberspace.
In August the anti-virus industry dissected a piece of malware named Gauss that had been unleashed on Middle Eastern banks.
Banking trojans are not particularly new, however, from Security News Daily:
“Differences in degree of sophistication are probably not particularly important at this stage,” George Smith, a senior fellow with the Alexandria, Va.-based defense-policy research organization GlobalSecurity.org, told SecurityNewsDaily. “[Gauss] looks like it’s fitting into the historical pattern. Just because the malware writers are working for a country doesn’t make them different than their older brethren …
“Maybe it’s a criminal tool,” Smith said. “However, the national arguments about cyberwar have always talked about opposing nations hitting banking and financial systems. So it is not really a surprise they would be making things to do the same.”
Hey, they read the western papers in Iran. And they know, or at least feel very strongly, they’ve been attacked by the US.
And so, from the New York Times, official pearl-clutching:
It raised suspicions that the Aramco hacking was retaliation. The United States fired one of the first shots in the computer war and has long maintained the upper hand. The New York Times reported in June that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the computer virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010 …
American intelligence officials blame Iran for a similar, subsequent attack on RasGas, the Qatari natural gas giant, two weeks after the Aramco attack. They also believe Iran engineered computer attacks that intermittently took America’s largest banks offline in September, and last week disrupted the online banking Web sites of Capital One and BB&T …
The finger-pointing demonstrates the growing concern in the United States among government officials and private industry that other countries have the technology and skill to initiate attacks. “The Iranians were faster in developing an attack capability and bolder in using it than we had expected,??? said James A. Lewis, a former diplomat and cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Both sides are going through a dance to figure out how much they want to turn this into a fight.???
Pot. Kettle. Black. To reiterate, the US finds itself plagued by a number of fundamental hypocrisies.
First, for about fifteen years it has regularly warned, in the direst terms, of the consequences of potential cyberattacks on the various networks of computers in the homeland infrastructure.
But now it is well known that it was the United States that clandestinely surprise attacked the nuclear program infrastructure of Iran with malware in furtherance of national security aims. A preemptive not-so-secret secret war was launched and we fired the first shots. And, presumably, continue the bombardment.
Another hypocrisy is when one tasks a top official water-bearer like Leon Panetta to parrot the line that the US is at risk of potential Iranian counter-strokes, which could appear to quite a few to be tit-for-tat. We poked them with various sticks and now someone is trying to poke us, and toadies, back.
And I’ve been pointing it out since before the two designated national security celebrities consulted by the New York Times.
This is not surprising. Feigning alarm or dismay is the rankest mendacity. Or as Loki said in The Avengers: “This is a child’s prayer, pathetic.”
Me, on Voice of America, last week:
“[Iran] came to the game late. In cyberspace, it’s basically an arms race, so people are going to be spurred by what they perceive other people to be doing.???
And at GlobalSecurity, here.
Reader’s note on The Center for Strategic and International Studies:
One of those many think tanks now responsible for finding and analyzing all the many enemies we must build our fortresses against.