The United States should expect cyberattacks to increase now that nuclear negotiations with Iran have ended, an Israeli military official is warning.
“Each and every player had an incentive to behave well until the [nuclear] negotiation … was to be decided upon,” Major Gen. Uzi Moskovitz said in a Tuesday interview with the Financial Times.
“In 2015, all the actors were trying to behave well, be good boys, because the global political system was very concentrated on the efforts to reach an arrangement regarding the Iranian issue,” he added. “So the Iranians had no incentive to impose attack waves on the U.S. banking system [or] to impose any attacks on oil and natural gas companies in the Gulf, as they did in 2012.”
With the negotiations over, Moskovitz said, “I think that some of the players in the cyberkinetic arena — this is my opinion — have decided to take their gloves off,” pointing to recent cyberattacks in Ukraine and Turkey to illustrate his point. Those attacks, linked to Russia, temporarily shut down power for nearly a million people in Ukraine, and took government and banking systems offline in Turkey.
Beginning in 2009, the U.S. and Israel seriously debilitated Iranian nuclear infrastructure using the “Stuxnet” virus. Since that time, the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has made significant strides in developing its cyber infrastructure. Along with North Korea, the country leads the developing work for its capacity to engage in cyberattacks.
Iran shut down systems for Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup in 2011 in an effort to protest U.S. sanctions. The country also hacked international energy firms in 2012, and it hacked the control system for a New York dam during a botched 2013 effort to hack a larger one in Oregon.
During negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program, the volume of attacks declined. The country did try to hack a limited number of staffers at the State Department late last year, but attacks aimed at causing physical harm or financial damage subsided.
Moskovitz suggested that period is going to end, and compared cyberwarfare to the indiscriminate aerial strikes of earlier times.
“In the cyberkinetic domain, we are still in the phase of carpet bombings,” he said. “First of all, this is so easy; second, there aren’t any air forces or pilots or airfields that would identify the attacker’s identity.”
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He concluded with a call for nations to define acceptable limits within the domain of cyberwarfare. “The nature and the depth and level of collateral damage or deliberate damage to the civilian domain will be topics that have to be discussed,” he said.
