Damian Paletta has an interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal that has some quotes from the Hill testimony of Admiral Rogers on Iran's use of cyber to attack the U.S. He said the Iranians had done less hacking since negotiations had become more serious on the nuclear agreement. Surprise, surprise.
This is the sort of thing that falls in the category of a question: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" The wife will never forget the beatings, if they took place, and the stopping will not make her feel better about her husband. Having the Director of the National Security Agency say Iran is not doing as many attacks as it did, should not make us feel any better about Iran. We don't forget.
Many of you have not heard of Newscaster, an enterprising Iranian effort to collect intelligence. [ see ISSight Partners website at http://www.isightpartners.com/2014/05/newscaster-iranian-threat-inside-social-media/ ]
"iSIGHT Partners believes Iranian threat actors are using more than a dozen fake personas on social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Blogger) in a coordinated, long-term cyber espionage campaign. At least 2,000 people/targets are, or have been, caught in the snare and are connected to the false personas." The name comes from the use of a website with news stories stolen from legitimate sites and copied onto their own. Maybe they have stopped that one since the negotiations started. Maybe not.
The really big one, of course was an Iran denial-of-service attack on U.S. banks which went on for over five weeks and ended somewhere around the end of 2012. You can read about tbat one at http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444592704578063063201649282 and many other places. Iran was not happy about sanctions, now to be lifted, and so attacked our banks to make trouble. We are supposed to forget that happened and rejoice in the fact that they have stopped attacking banks.
I hear only politics in all of this. Some good may come of this deranged agreement to allow Iran to continue on its nuclear path, but it won't be the reason for them to stop attacking the U.S. whenever they have an excuse.
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