Please elaborate on this. As someone with direct exposure to this area and in this geography, my experience could not be described this way at all.
Let's not forget Iran's first "military satellite" was launched with an over the counter unencrypted amateur cubesat transponder manufactured by a Californian company
Given your exposure in this geography can you name any of it's neighbors who have greater or even equal competency that aren't Israel or don't use citizens from an _extremely_ competent nation-state? They certainly had their way with Aramco, so not Saudi Arabia. Egypt? Jordan? Syria? Iraq? Perhaps Lebanon? And this just their neighbors. What about compared to Portugal or Spain? South Africa? Nigeria? Argentina or Mexico?
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> Given your exposure in this geography can you name any of it's neighbors
Saudi Arabia targetted at least Bezos' phone
The only attacks I know of are low brow phishing, DoS and web site defacements.
North Korea can't even feed its own people or keep the lights on in 2/3rds of the country. But nobody suggests they're unsophisticated cyber actors; that would be a demonstrably silly statement. Meanwhile: people routinely travel in and out of Iran; if you're not an American, it remains a major tourist destination. They have trade relationships around the world. They're not a hermit kingdom. If they want a world-class "APT" team, or 15 of them, all they have to do is decide to have them. (I assume they decided that a long time ago).
If you think Iran is unsophisticated or has minimal capabilities, I'd suggest you just look at a map, and, for bonus points, a GDP ranking, and consider that whatever evidence you personally may have collected on Iran's capabilities, you're seeing what they've allowed you to see.
Myself, I wouldn't even pick a fight with Kiribati.
What's the difference between what they can do, and what the leading countries in cybersecurity (US, Israel) can do(offensively and defensively)?
Is there a significant difference?
The other big question is how much this stuff applies to defense. The US presumably has better defensive capabilities than Iran could hope to have, by far. But better enough to matter? Open question.
Fun fact, the text message with the malicious link was sent to Bezos by MBS himself
~170 nations that don't have the capability. Just because a 14-year old in Thailand can mount an attack doesn't mean Thailand's government or civil institutions have or utilize that capability. That makes them less than _very_ competent at it.
> Saudi Arabia targetted at least Bezos' phone
And a coup that was, likely using off-the-shelf software from an Italian company composed of engineers from two _extremely_ competent nation-states. That certainly shows how easy it is to acquire the capability, if not the competency. The KSA has been doing it for years with it's armed forces munitions and equipment.
Launching a satellite means you can put a warhead anywhere on earth and no one can stop it. It's a achievement in rocketry, not whatever is on the end of the rocket. The actual satellite could be a crushed car for all anyone cares.
Wiping of a US casino's IT infra in 2014:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/irani...
Breaching of critical power/water infrastructure in 2015:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hackers-infrastructure-1....
For the casino hacks they brute forced some passwords and then wrote malware with Visual Basic to steal more credentials. The technical barriers there are fairly low. For the attacks on the water infrastructure they probably just scanned looking for open systems and ran off the shelf exploits on the ones that looked the most interesting.
Attacking in this way is a lot easier than attacking a specific target. If I just wanted to "hurt" a country from a PR perspective then there's a lot of attack surface, and you only need to get one or two things through to make the news. Targeting something like a secure nuclear facility is orders of magnitude more difficult.
Essentially every deployed system is so littered with security defects in every facet of both design and implementation that successful attacks against them can be developed and deployed at a cost of just a few tens of thousands to maybe a million dollars for a really good attack at the high end. Any reasonably-sized state actor can deploy literally thousands of times that many resources against their adversaries without even blinking and we know that the NSA and CIA were independently running hacking programs capable of attacking essentially every publicly deployed system in the world. Offense is so easy and defense is so bad it is ridiculous.
A quick search about their operations:
- Shamoon malware was categorized as cyberwarfare and it was used against Saudi Aramco, allegedly by Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamoon
- A blackout in Turkey was also linked to Iran
https://observer.com/2015/04/iran-flexes-its-power-by-transp...
- Iran is also (allegedly) active in Information Warfare, which is much more complicated than technical cyber attacks.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/russia-and-iran-tried-to-int...
- Israel and Iran are actively attacking each others infrastructure for a while.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/05/israel-and-iran-just-sh...
- Operation Newscaster. Cyber espionage and social engineering targeted senior U.S. military and diplomatic personnel, congresspeople, journalists, lobbyists, think tankers and defense contractors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Newscaster
- Operation Cleaver. targeted the military, oil and gas, energy and utilities, transportation, airlines, airports, hospitals and aerospace industries organizations worldwide.
“We may be at far greater risk from the internet than was ever suspected,” Michail McGuire, senior lecturer of criminology, said. His new study of the nation-state cybersphere shows that we may be closer to advanced cyber conflict (cyberwar) than at any point since the inception of the internet.
I thought it was far fetched, but incident like this show it’s not.
https://press.hp.com/content/dam/sites/garage-press/press/pr...
And there it is on page 1!
Excellent contribution, thank you so much for this.
They are actually two wildly different problem sets. And the latter is boring & unsexy.
This can be seen by how many automated infiltration agents are around, and how few automated defense systems. And how annoyingly succesful they are.
Strictly speaking, Iran is not a nation-state. It is a multiethnic state.
The way to avoid this confusion is to write ‘state’ (problem here is that this word also refers to American states) or ‘country’ (I think people might feel like this word is not sufficiently sophisticated?).
However the error is understandable as it is particularly common in discussions about cybersecurity (or national security, where ‘national’ means the USA). It’s especially silly in those cases as some typical US adversaries (Iran, Russia) are states which are not nation states.
I don’t see how Iran’s multiethnic populace disqualifies it’s claim on a national identity (Shia Islam).
On the wiki page for multinational states, I find reasonable examples (Russia, Belgium, UK), and Iran is absent. [1] Does this have to do with the Kurdish nation claiming territory within Iran?
Not trying to say you’re wrong, just trying to understand the terminology better.
Apparently ~1/2 of Iranian citizens claim Farsi as their mother tongue, with many citizens claiming Turkic dialects, Kurdish, and "Linguistically-Iranian languages" that are not Farsi (in my mind, this is comparable to Gaeilge, Scots, Welsh within the UK).
Then again, I'm sure that identifying as an atheist or non-Shia Muslim in Iran is not in most citizens' best interests, regardless of their underlying beliefs.
I don't have a point or conclusion, I do think it's a reasonable thing to discuss. Ultimately, "nation" is an human construct, the and the people who have the authority to claim it are the Iranian people.
The Kurds (who compose a significant minority within Iran) would reject the nationalities "Iranian" or "Persian", I think; even more so than Catalans, Basque, or Galcian peoples would reject "Spanish". I don't know if other minorities comprising Iran would, too. It's an interesting question to ponder, though.
Anyways, thank you all for this pedantic stroll, it made me learn more about this part of the world than I probably would have, otherwise. :P
Switzerland, Britain, ...
Strictly speaking, you need to consult the dictionary.
noun: a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory: leading industrialized nations.
Iran checks multiple boxes on that list.
As for US, is it really a nation or is it a corporate spin off? Curious, too, how those 13 bars ended up as 13 "states"..
Wikipedia gives a more narrow definition of nation-state than you (but English dictionaries by their nature tend to give broad definitions) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state
Nation state security competence includes locking down USB ports so someone can't deploy malware found off the street.
From where I'm sitting, Iran is a cyber circus.
Nation-states using cyber capabilities in this way, and the non-response it evokes, is reminiscent of how pre-WWI nation-states would conduct policy and international affairs with their armies.
It's something I wish the general public were more cognizant of. We need to openly talk about this type of power and conflict. Otherwise we're going to have another WWI-type moment, where it takes millions of people dying before we realize that the state of the game has changed because of new technologies.