Electric Grid Attacks and Retribution

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica describes an attack confirmed by the Israelis have been made on the Israeli electric grid.  Similar attacks were launched against cities last month in the Ukraine [ see Http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ukraine-cyberattack-1.3398492 ] The Ukraine attacks were carried out by Russians.  The Israeli attacks were not pinned down yet, but will probably turn out to be Iran.  Russia and Iran have been friends in Syria and elsewhere for awhile now and seem to be heading in the same direction in cyber attacks.  This creates a problem for anyone trying to retaliate against them.  The Israelis will retaliate.  Whether they should attack the seller of this kind of attack, or the buyer of it, is another matter.

Several analysts have the code used in these attacks.  The Israelis wouldn't have announced the attack until they had dealt with it and had it under control.  This is not a trivial matter, since it is required to figure out who to attack. This is one of those things that requires "in kind" retribution, something the Israelis are good at.

Code analyis is not an exact science, given all the code that is used and sold around the world.  It could be made in Russia and sold by Chinese to someone in Iran.  It might be specifically customized to target the systems used in Israel.  Country of origin is important, but not essential.  They want to know the country that deployed it.  That country may, as the Russians and Chinese do, hire a third party to do the work, either a non-government entity or the government of another country.

Preparing a cyber attack is not a simple process, since they would want to limit damage to the attacker.  They don't want to attack Iran and have the effects felt in Germany where some of the new Iranian networks terminate.  That takes time too.  While we are thinking about it, maybe the time is right to make some preparations for ourselves.