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Iran's Hackers Are America's Newest Cyber Threat
(Foreign Policy) Shane Harris - In March 2012, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, publicly announced the creation a new Supreme Council of Cyberspace to defend the Islamic republic's computer networks and develop news ways of infiltrating or attacking the computer networks of its enemies. In late 2012, U.S. intelligence officials believe hackers in Iran launched a series of debilitating assaults on the Web sites of major U.S. banks. Last year, U.S. officials say that Iranian hackers infiltrated a large unclassified computer network used by the Navy and Marine Corps. Officials now say it took the Navy four months to fully clear its systems and recover from the breach. "Iran should be considered a first-tier cyber power," Gabi Siboni, a cyber security expert with Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, said in Washington last December. Some analysts have blamed Iran for an attack on the computers of Saudi Aramco that erased data from 30,000 computers, but didn't affect oil and gas production and distribution. James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, recently warned that Iran's "development of cyber espionage or attack capabilities might be used in an attempt to either provoke or destabilize the United States or its partners."