Cyberattacks on Banks Launched from Iran

Over the last year US banks have come under siege from distributed denial of services (DDOS) attacks. We now know that those attacks originated in Iran. Yep, it seems like the US and Iran are in a cyberwar.

The news was broken by the Washington Post, after two major banks had service interruptions at the same time. While it is hard to prove that the attacks originated from Iran, previous attacks have been reported from the country and it seems likely, especially given that we have been slamming the country with our own cyber-weapons. That, and we have the Chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, claiming that it is the case.

Said Lieberman, in an interview with C-SPAN,

I don’t believe these were just hackers who were skilled enough to cause disruption of the Web sites. I think this was done by Iran and the Quds Force, which has its own developing cyberattack capability.

The attacks are believed to be a retaliatory strike following the deployment of the Stuxnet virus in the country, which caused serious damage to Iran's nuclear program. Several plant explosions in the country are blamed on the virus, thank to it messing with the controls for industrial machinery used in the production of nuclear reactors or bombs.

Iran's approach is different than the US's. Instead of targeting military installations, Iran is hoping for an economic disturbance. If they are able to succeed, their approach could prove far more dangerous.

The frightening thing about this is the scale of the attacks being launched. In a previous attack on AT&T, it was an order of magnitude greater than anything AT&T had previously seen. Fortunately, the Iranians aren't very good at this yet. But once they master the art of cyberwarfare, we could be looking at the first example of how destructive cyberweapons truly are.

Washington Post Photo by : Wikipedia