Iranian Cyber Force - the increasing of Iranian cyber-military capability

The strenghten of Iranian cyber-space mercenaries is going beyond the menace of USA to Iran in the nuclear programs, and beyond the West and Muslims historic problem.

The hybrid warfare and the new constant menaces of small wars, are being supported by attacks that can disrupt the war with interruption of information, logistic dificulty and political influence in the battle field.

USA is looking badly to Middle East, supporting any attack against Iran and Syria to promote geopolitical intercourse to Eurasia.

But Iran is financing more and more the capability and high technology to attack through cyber space, disrupting the communication through west and promoting psywar and cyber war against USA and Israel, it thanked to Stuxnet, that delayed the nuclear program and stole informations from the country, the country had decreased the vulnerability, changing the paradigm of the old war methods of direct combats to the new wars of information and irregular scenarios, with cyber back up.

Also the backup on Turkey's operation and the approximation of Turkey in local warfare, shows that Iran is searching new partnerships on local warfare, with less driving force and more intelligence and irregular forces.

Iran have been constantly clashed by cyber attacks since Stuxnet, different from Syria that have been physically attacked, it's a cause of the historic high investments in the armies, having one of the strongest air forces, a high number of army men, and paramilitary and political armed men, as Hezbollah and other pro-Islam militias, non-terrorists - considered terrorits to the West. A kind of changing from soldiers to mercenaries and now mercenaries for hackers, than save the horse power to geopolitical defense and visual impact.

Some other groups can be contracted as cyber mercenaries found in web and deep web, that are using it's capability as a hit and run strategy, and use the terror to deter the capability of attacks. Cyber terrorism is another treat.

The steal of information of Facebook can be also used for promote psychological operations and penetrate the influence of political decisions through society, as changing the opinion of society and influence a possible political decision on hard or soft power politics through Middle East.

That's a reason that USA never directly attacked Iran and searched in proxies the attacks, as Syria and Iraq, testing the power through private forces and NATO.

Iran is investing lot at cyber warfare and is having capability to hijack some of the most capable defenses in world, as Israel and FBI, CIA, not with total success, but discovering their weakeness slowly, it shows that the most prominent defenses and inteligence systems have failure.

Secret U.S. Cyber Mission Devastated Iran's Attack Capabilities, Officials Say

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/08/29/secret-cyber-mission-devastated-irans-attack-capabilities-us-officials-say/#303f38335cb3

The cyber conflict between Iran and the U.S. is now a constant—it doesn't diminish simply because the headlines go away. And it's a constant that alternates between computer networks and the media. Now, unnamed U.S. officials have told the U.S. media that covert attacks on Iranian intelligence systems in June had such a devastating impact, that the country has yet to recover its capabilities.

Those systems, the officials say, were used to direct targeting against commercial vessels in the Gulf. And so Iran's ability to mount further attacks has—for the time being—been seriously degraded.

The cyberattack in question took place in June, and it followed the heavily-publicized attacks on oil tankers that were attributed to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, becoming the catalyst for additional U.S. military resources being deployed to the region.

According to U.S. officials, Iran is still trying to recover from the attack, with data lost and capability taken offline. In fact, an irony reported in the U.S. media and attributed to U.S. officials, is that the cost of the attack to the U.S. was lost access to the networks which were attacked, resulting in lost intelligence.

As I've reported before, cyber warfare has reached a new phase this year—at least in terms of public awareness of the threat. The increased levels of integration between physical and cyber—an attack in one domain and retaliation in another.

And while it might be asymmetrical—the U.S. hitting core command and control systems and Iran hitting less hardened critical infrastructure or commercial targets—the menace is real. "When people ask me what keeps you up at night," Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has said, "that is kind of the thing that keeps me up at night."

A New York Times report cited a former intelligence official explaining that "American cyberoperations are designed to change Iran’s behavior without initiating a broader conflict or prompting retaliation—because they are rarely acknowledged publicly, cyberstrikes are much like covert operations."

There are many key differences between cyber and physical attacks—lack of obvious attribution and rubble for TV news crews to film, challenges in assessing where adversary nation states might be collaborating, covert intelligence operations to prepare the ground. But, above all, cyberattacks present a real challenge in distinguishing between perception and reality. And that perception is often fed to the media and to analysts who have no tools to check what they're being told. And, as a result, it can become "reality" with relative ease.

Everyone plays the game. The media cycle has become part of the process. "You need to ensure your adversary understands one message—the U.S. has enormous capabilities which they can never hope to match, and it would be best for all concerned if they simply stopped their offending actions," the former official told the Times.

And this links into the broader sphere of hybrid warfare that is the real context behind what we are seeing now. The predictability of the media's response to events is part of the planning process.

In terms of the attack itself, there is clearly a question as to whether the U.S. offensive is better preparing Iran to defend against future attacks. The Times report cites an official explaining that "Iran is a sophisticated actor, they will look at what happened—to see how they were penetrated."

The inference is that a cyber weapon can only be used a small number of times before it is compromised and defences extended or adapted. Clearly that's true, but there are many other dimensions at play here.

Cyber offences in the military sphere usually involve some level of physical compromise. That might be human—the use of social media or assets on the ground to identify human points of entry into organisations and systems. It might be physical—covert entry into locations to attack networks or computer systems to pull data and, again, to find entry points. It might be the capture of a system or asset that can then be examined and evaluated, again to better understand where weaknesses might lie.

Any cyber offensive will seek to protect the intelligence assets that have enabled the attack. "It can take a long time to obtain access, and that access is burned when you go into the system and delete something," the former legal counsel for Cyber Command told the Times.

This is the same for all actors in the cyber field. It would be no different for Russia or China or North Korea or Iran itself—except that, in cyber, the U.S. (and its allies) and Russia and China operate at a level of sophistication beyond what is currently being seen from other threat actors. In fact, it is the potential for Moscow or Beijing to provide deniable assistance to Teheran that is the most unnerving element of the current conflict.

And so the cyber conflict is here to stay. The U.S. sent a message with its attacks that "we can reach into your most secure networks." It has now reinforced that message. There is likely a reason for that. There are no coincidental timings at this level in cyber warfare, everything is planned, strategized and linked. And so, in reading the media reports—including this one, you have become part of the process.