Summary: The Justice Department under direction by the Obama Administration will publicly announce the Iranian government officials believed to be part of a cyber-attack on a New York dam.
The Justice Department is currently preparing an indictment against those involved in a cyber-attack on the New York dam. The Obama administration plans to publicly denounce the Iranian hackers from the 2013 incident.
Read Iran Agrees to Limit Nuclear Program to “Moderately Destructive” Capabilities to learn more about their nuclear program.
The Bowman Avenue Dam, 30 miles north of New York City, is not an overly sophisticated dam and the hackers only gained access to back office systems and no operational systems. It did not take long for investigators to determine the attack came from the Iranian government. Regardless of what the hackers gained access to, the Obama administration are concerned about the vulnerability of other U.S. infrastructures to future attacks.
Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said they will take any “malicious activity in cyberspace seriously, and we will continue to use all the tools at our disposal to prevent, deter, detect, counter and mitigate such activity.” They have taken to publicly calling out those that target U.S. companies and government networks.
In 2014, Chinese military members were accused of being behind a series of attacks on U.S. industrial companies. Last year North Korea was accused by the FBI publicly of being behind the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.
At the time of the dam attack, the U.S. and Iran were in talks over the nuclear program in Iran. The hackers used off-the-shelf malicious software tools on a comparatively insignificant piece of U.S. infrastructure.
Read U.S. Banks Facing DDOS Attacks by Middle-East Hackers.
In 2009 and 2010, the U.S. was responsible for using a malicious computer bug against an Iranian nuclear facility.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/10/politics/iran-us-dam-cyber-attack/
Photo: cryptome.org
