Iran ready to counter US cyber attack

Iran’s Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi says the Islamic Republic has developed ways to counter the United States’ secret cyber project.

“This is not a new movement, and the Americans, and in fact the intelligence services of US allies and even some regional countries, have invested heavily in cyber space since the 2009 sedition [in Iran],” Moslehi said on Wednesday, referring to the unrest following Iran’s presidential election two years ago.

“[US President Barack] Obama has several times confessed in US Congress and other places that cyber war against the Islamic Republic has not been successful and admitted defeat,” Fars News Agency quoted Moslehi as saying.

The Iranian intelligence minister added that the Islamic Republic has predicted moves such as “Internet in a suitcase” project, and has designed ways to confront them.

The US is developing a secret cyber project, a device labeled ‘Internet in a suitcase’, which could be smuggled into a country and then quickly set up to provide wireless Internet service over a wide area.

The US State Department has provided USD 2 million for the project, The New York Times reported.

In early October, Iran said that it has detected and thwarted a cyber attack by the Stuxnet worm, which was supposedly created to infect Iranian industrial and nuclear sites.

The Stuxnet worm, first indentified by Iranian officials in June, is a malware designed to infect computers using Siemens Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) — a control system favored by industries that manage water supplies, oil rigs and power plants.

Iranian experts say the worm may have been created by a state-sponsored organization in the United States or Israel to target specific control software being used in the Iranian industrial sector, including the Bushehr plant — Iran’s first nuclear power plant.