

In September 2012, Iranian hackers directed a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against U.S. Iran has primarily targeted the private sector rather than U.S. Since 2009, Iran’s cyber capabilities have since grown in sophistication and scope. Iranian cyber activities against the U.S. Iranian cyberattacks against the United States date back to 2009, when the so-called “Iranian Cyber Army” defaced Twitter’s homepage in response to the Green Revolution protests over alleged fraud in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Screenshot of the Twitter homepage in December 2009 And in June 2020, Google said that Iran tried and failed to breach e-mail accounts associated with President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. In October 2019, Microsoft warned that an Iranian-government hacker group had tried to breach e-mail accounts associated with journalists, current and former U.S. Iran, in turn, has ramped up its efforts to penetrate U.S. The United States struck again in September 2019 after Iran allegedly launched drones and cruise missiles on two Saudi oil facilities. drone with a cyberattack on a Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) database used to plan attacks on tankers. In June 2019, the Trump administration retaliated against Iran’s downing of a U.S.

In 2010, the Stuxnet virus, allegedly designed by the United States and Israel, seriously damaged the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.Īfter Trump’s order widening the CIA’s authority to launch cyberattacks, the United States stepped up its cyber efforts against Iran. President Obama expanded Olympic Games to include the use of offensive cyber weapons against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.

Started in 2006 under the Bush administration, the program targeted Iranian nuclear capabilities.

cyber activities against Iran are widely traced to a covert campaign code-named Operation Olympic Games. “We reserve the right to legitimate defense and proportional and appropriate response to the aggression and harm against our country in the face of cyber and non-cyber attacks.” The Islamic Republic will “employ any tool to defend ourselves,” including cyber and “other weaponry.” The scope of the attacks “is a worrying issue for the entire world, and the international community must give an appropriate response to it,” he added. Mousavi claimed that the attacks had failed or been “repulsed by our defense systems and the cyber incident response teams.” Iran has nonetheless vowed retaliation for the “illegal and criminal order and for proving the U.S. cyberwarfare specialists training at the Warfield Air National Guard Base in Maryland government will be the prime suspect for any cyberattack against Iran hereafter, unless the contrary is proved.” In September 2018, President Trump reportedly granted the CIA more authority to conduct cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure. Trump’s order, it would be perfectly natural to say that the U.S. Iran has identified the perpetrators “sponsoring and directing the attacks – in some cases the sponsor state – and the groups aiding and abetting the attacks,” he added. Given the sophisticated technology used, “one can say they have been sponsored or launched by governments.” “A couple of cyberattacks on a broader scale have been launched against the country’s infrastructure,” Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Mousavi told reporters. On July 23, the Foreign Ministry acknowledged that the longstanding cyber campaign against Iran’s infrastructure had escalated in recent months. Cyber offered an alternative to kinetic military action that could lead to full-scale war – which both Washington and Tehran sought to avoid. The scope was unknown, but cyberspace has turned into a virtual battlefield. Both governments acknowledged that cyberattacks were central to their strategies. By 2020, tensions between the United States and Iran increasingly played out in invisible cyberspace.
