Iran has vowed to retaliate for the drone strike, and cyber terror is one path it is expected to take. The threat is considered to be real, and both the US public and private sectors are on high alert.

An Iranian hacker group calling itself the ‘Iran Cyber Security Group Hackers’ attacked a US govt agency called Federal Depository Library Program. They put up a message of “revenge” for the death of Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian general who was recently killed by the US government in a targeted drone strike.

The hackers retitled the home page as “Iranian Hackers” and replaced the image of President Trump with a supposed fist of Iranian army with Iran’s flag in the background and Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s photo.

The event may just be the beginning of a cyberwar between the two countries. “With his departure and with God’s power, his work and path will not cease and severe revenge awaits those criminals who have tainted their filthy hands with his blood and blood of the other martyrs (sic),” the message read. “This is only a small portion of Iran’s cyber capability ! (sic),” the message continued.

The killing of Suleimani last week brought a furious vow of revenge from Tehran. Since then there have been massive protest rallies calling for revenge against the Trump-led US government. 

The cyber event was confirmed by the US Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency. The agency, however, added that “at this time, there is no confirmation that this was the action of Iranian state-sponsored actors.”

But Iran’s cyber terror has been continually on the rise given the extreme sanctions it has faced, and now the attacks from the US in recent years, under Trump administration.

The Department of Homeland Security also gave a warning about a potential series of destructive cyberattacks originating from Iran in 2019. Microsoft, then said in October, that Iranian hackers had targeted a US presidential campaign, and then in December 2019, IBM X-Force has been published detecting a new Iranian wiper malware type in an attack on companies, in an unidentified Gulf country. The attack was linked with the Iranian threat group “Oilrig”, also known as APT 34. 

Iran’s Capabilities In Cyber Terror

Iran has vowed to retaliate for the drone strike, and cyber terror is one path the country is expected to take. The threat is considered to be real, and both the US public and private sectors are on high alert. Government officials are said to expect attacks focusing on disrupting anything from corporate and municipal information technology systems to transit, logistics, healthcare or US military facilities.

The Iranian Cyber Army is a Persian computer hacker organisation, which is considered to be connected to the Iranian government and has pledged loyalty to the Supreme Leader of Iran. It was created in 2005 and has claimed responsibility for multiple attacks that had happened over the web since 2009, most particularly the attacks against Baidu and Twitter.

In 2013, a general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards stated that Iran had “the 4th biggest cyber power among the world’s cyber armies”, a claim supported by the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies. According to cybersecurity experts, a decade ago, Iran had already identified cyberwar capabilities as part of its attack strategy and has gradually been building up capabilities since the country’s nuclear centrifuges were hit by the Stuxnet virus in 2010. Within a few years, Iranian hackers were able to grow cyber terror capabilities to launch Shamoon computer virus attacks in 2012 against the national oil companies including Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s RasGas. In fact, in 2019, both the US and UK governments have published many public alerts on Iranian cybersecurity threats.

Iran Is A Serious Threat For The World Wide Web

The most common type of cyber terror originating from Iran is the one that has been used repeatedly against its neighbours in recent years — a wiper malware made to wipe data on as many computers as possible inside target networks. Iran has used this wiper malware like Shamoon and Stone Drill to create waves of disruption in neighbouring nations and in the Middle East.

According to Microsoft security researchers, Iranian threat organisation APT 33 has been targeting industrial control systems in the US through a wave of password-spraying attacks against manufacturers, industrial equipment suppliers, and other companies working on industrial controls. Other attacks have also focused on US energy companies.

Another Iranian hacker group — Khaybar Centre for Information Technology was created in 2011 and has done many cyber terror operations in the United States like attacking water dams, banking firms, and power stations. The Khaybar Center also infiltrated networks of Saudi banks, the Saudi kingdom’s statistics centre, which caused a 12-hour electricity cut in Turkey and attacked numerous Israeli institutions and satellites, according to cybersecurity analysts.

On the espionage aspect, Iranian hackers have been associated with robbing the intellectual property (IP) and data belonging to universities within America and its allies, which led to the Department of Justice indicting nine Iranian hackers in the year 2018. After President Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal, the attacks paved its way to a series of cyber activity coming from Iranian hackers targeting multiple entities in the US in relation to Iran-US Nuclear Deal.

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