There has been recent reporting that the US has linked Iran with cyberattacks against American transportation and healthcare infrastructure. This comes on the heels of escalating Iranian aggression in cyberspace and follows severe disruptions to America’s oil and gas infrastructure last spring after the cyberattack on JBS.
In a statement, the U.S. FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency together with the UK and Australian cyber security centres said that Iranian government-sponsored hackers had been “actively targeting a broad range of victims across multiple US critical infrastructure sectors, including the transportation sector and the healthcare and public health sector”.
Many of these cyberattacks appear to be connected to ransomware. Moreover, Iran’s cyberattacks are already so “extremely active and persistent” according to cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs, speaking with the website Recode. Krebbs added: “It’s difficult to think of what might constitute an escalation of that activity.”
According to some analysts, Iranian cyberattacks against the U.S. can be dated back to 2009, when the so-called “Iranian Cyber Army” defaced Twitter’s homepage.
Craig Mueller, a government cybersecurity expert and VP at cloud cyber co. iboss, explains to Digital Journal that Iran has become a threat to U.S. interests on par with Russia. Furthermore, he warns of dire outcomes should an attack against these vulnerable sectors be successful.
Mueller expands on this warning, explaining: “It has become increasingly clear that America’s concerns about dangerous nation state-affiliated hackers should not be limited strictly to Russia. Iran has proven to be an adversary capable of sowing chaos through sophisticated attacks and new reports that it may be targeting our transportation and healthcare sector should be chilling.”
Drawing on a recent case pertaining to the U.S., Mueller cites: “As we saw last spring with the JBS Pipeline attack, our nation’s infrastructure has serious vulnerabilities, and a successful attack on these sectors could be devastating.”
It should be noted that in 2019, the United States Cyber Command conducted online attacks against an Iranian intelligence groups. This was specific towards government officials that the U.S. believed helped plan the attacks against oil tankers in recent weeks, as the New York Times reported.
