Officials of America Observe Surge in Cyber-Espionage Attacks against Iran

Newsmax.com reported on 24th November, 2015, quoting American officials and private security groups as saying: "We observe a surge in sophisticated cyber-espionage by Iran with a series of cyberattacks against State Department officials".

The New York Times reports that the latest information on the cyberattacks comes just after four months of the historic agreement with Teheran to restrict its atomic ambitions.

The Times reports that although cyberskills of Iran is not yet similar to that of China or Russia, American officials have concluded that cyberespionage "is becoming a tool to get the inspiration to gain nuclear program in the country as believed by many in Iran".

The newspaper says that the Iranian hackers were capable to access the email account and social media accounts of officials of State Department who exclusively deal with issues in Middle East and Iran.

The New York Times quotes officials of law enforcement as saying that the initial alert of the attacks came from Facebook which cautioned some of the affected users that their accounts had been hijacked by a state-sponsored attack.

The hackers of Iranian Revolutionary Guard used the access to discover the victim's contacts and build "spear-phishing" email attacks which gave them admittance to targeted e-mail accounts of individual. Arstechnica.com published news on 25th November, 2015, quoting a statement given by an unnamed Senior US official to the New York Times as "the attack was very cautiously designed and demonstrated the degree to which they understood which of our personnel was working on Iran issues now that the nuclear deal is done".

According to data of Check Point and iSight Partners, the latest attack came after a short period of little or no Iranian bustle against US targets during the summer and it was a change from strategies which were formerly associated with Iranian hackers. Previous attacks endorsed to Iran were centered to take websites of financial services companies' offline and to destroy data like the assault on casino company Las Vegas Sands Corp in 2014 after its main owner announced for a nuclear attack on Iran. These cyber attacks might not have been executed by the government of Iran but by Iranian or pro-Iranian "hacktivists".

» SPAMfighter News - 12/7/2015