US claims new cyber intrusions from ME

In a new claim, US officials have warned of a fresh wave of cyber attacks against American corporations, originating “somewhere in the Middle East” and ‘sabotage’ as the key objective rather than ‘espionage,’ as in most previous cases blamed on China.

The targets have mainly been US energy companies, and the attacks “appeared to be probes, looking for ways to seize control of their processing systems,” The New York Times reports Monday, citing American federal officials, who insisting that the attacks “are continuing.”

“We are concerned by these intrusions, and we are trying to make sure they don’t lead to something much bigger, as they did in the Saudi case,” a senior US official is quoted as saying, referring to a major cyber attack last summer that disabled 30,000 computers at Saudi Arabia’s US-backed Aramco oil company, which is reported to be among the world’s largest oil producers.

While reiterating that the recent attacks on US energy companies aimed to destroy data or manipulate industrial machinery and take over or shut down networks that deliver energy, American official further concede that the new cyber attacks are “much more like the Stuxnet worm that the United States and Israel secretly used against Iran’s nuclear enrichment plants” years ago, according to the report.

The daily then emphasizes that when the joint Israeli-American covert cyber operation against the Islamic Republic began, “President [Barack] Obama, among other officials, expressed worry that its eventual discovery could prompt retaliatory attacks.”

While Washington appears eager to accuse Tehran for the recent alleged cyber intrusions, as it did in the Saudi Aramco case, the report cites a US official as refusing to name any specific country as the source of the new cyber attacks against American companies, claiming only that “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East,” without elaborating.

In the Aramco incident, the virus reportedly replaced company data on thousands of computers with an image of a burning American flag, prompting the US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to warn of an impending “cyber 9/11” if Washington did not respond to such attacks more efficiently.

The report further cites two senior US officials “who have been briefed on the new intrusions” as saying that they largely targeted “administrative systems of about 10 major American energy firms,” but refusing to identify them.

According to the report, while the US Department of Homeland Security has emphasized on the need to expand its ‘cyber security force’ by as many as “600 hacking specialist to keep pace with the rising number of threats,” it has been struggling in the past four months with the resignation of some of its top officials, including the agency’s deputy secretary, its top cyber security official, and the assistant secretary for cyber security.

While the US has commonly blamed other rival countries, especially China and Russia, for waging extensive cyber attacks against American corporate and government computer networks, a recent report has revealed that Washington is behind massive cyber attacks against various countries across the globe.

According to a recent article by American journalist Joseph Menn, the White House and the contractors of the Defense Department have gone to great lengths to exploit “security flaws” in the computers of foreign countries for extensive cyber espionage and offensive cyber warfare.