US hacking accusations against Iran ‘ridiculous’

The recent US accusations against Iran over a campaign of cyber attacks on American banks are “ridiculous” and “funny” when Washington has been guilty of the same crime for years, an American writer and political analyst says.

The Stuxnet computer worm developed during the Obama administration to sabotage Iran’s civilian nuclear program was “really dangerous and high level,” said Daniel Patrick Welch, a political commentator in Boston, Massachusetts.

“This is the highest level of cyber terrorism; the US has done this all over the world for years and these are only the things that we know about,” Welch told Press TV on Thursday.

“This justice in the United States is a complete fraud, like democracy in the United States is a complete fraud,” he added.

The US government has charged several Iranian hackers with coordinating a campaign of cyber attacks on dozens of American banks and a dam in New York state from 2011 to 2013.

The US Justice Department on Thursday announced the indictment of seven Iranian hackers, which was filed in a federal court in New York City.

The indictment described the suspects as “experienced computer hackers” who live in Iran and may have been working on behalf of the Iranian government.

At a news conference announcing the charges, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the head of the Justice Department, said the accused hackers caused tens of millions of dollars in damages in their assault on US banks.

The US hacking charges come on the heels of a recent report that the US had developed an “elaborate plan” for an extensive cyber attack against Iran in case the negotiations to reach a nuclear agreement failed.

Code-named Nitro Zeus, the cyber attack plan was designed as an “alternative” to target Iran’s air defenses, communications systems and crucial segments of its electrical power grid, the New York Times reported in February.

In June 2010, it was revealed that the US and Israel carried out a cyber attack against Iran to sabotage the country’s civilian nuclear program.

In that attack, Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz was the target of the Stuxnet virus in what has become the most serious case of state cyber-terrorism because of its complexity and sabotage of sensitive properties.