New computer attacks traced to Iran, U.S. officials claim

Source : http://old.mehrnews.com/

TEHRAN, May 26 (MNA) – U.S. officials and corporate security experts examining a new wave of potentially destructive computer attacks striking American corporations, especially energy firms, claimed that they have tracked the attacks back to Iran.

The targets have included several American oil, gas and electricity companies, which government officials have refused to identify. The goal is not espionage, they said, but sabotage. Government officials describe the attacks as probes looking for ways to seize control of critical processing systems.

Investigators began looking at the attacks several months ago, and when the Department of Homeland Security issued a vaguely worded warning this month, a government official told the New York Times that “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.”

Government officials and outside experts on Friday confirmed a report in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the source of the attacks had been narrowed to Iran. They said the evidence was not specific enough to conclude with confidence that the attacks were state-sponsored.

American officials did not offer any technical evidence to back up their assertions of Iranian authorship of the latest attacks, but they described the recent campaign as different from most attacks against American companies — particularly those from China — which quietly siphon off intellectual property for competitive purposes.

The new attacks, officials said, were devised to destroy data and manipulate the machinery that operates critical control systems, like oil pipelines. One official described them as “probes that suggest someone is looking at how to take control of these systems.”

Government officials also claimed that Iran was the source of a separate continuing campaign of attacks on American financial institutions that began last September and has since taken dozens of American banks intermittently offline, costing millions of dollars. But that attack was a less sophisticated “denial of service” effort.

Ali Reza Miryousefi, the head of the press office of the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, in an article published in the May 23 edition of the New York Times in response to an article entitled “Cyberattacks Against U.S. Corporations Are on the Rise,” which was published in the May 13 edition of the paper, dismissed the claims that Iran was behind cyber attacks against the United States.

AM/PA MNA END