Iran devising strategic plan to enhance cyber defense

The head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization says Iranian computer experts are preparing a strategic cyber defense plan to defend the country against any possible cyber attack.

The country’s cyber command was established in the last Iranian year (ended March 19, 2012) and now the formulation of the “cyber defense strategy is on our agenda,” Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali said on Thursday.

“The important point is that we devise cyber defense mechanisms in such a way as to enable us to defend the country against new viruses in the future as well,” Jalali added.

He defined Iran’s cyber defense as a measure to reduce the vulnerability of the country’s key infrastructures, adding that Iran has no plan to carry out cyber attacks against any country.

The Iranian official went on to say that over the past few years, the country was the target of numerous cyber attacks aimed at disrupting the country’s nuclear energy program, but the Iranian experts managed to monitor and counter the threats in time.

On April 23, the Iranian Oil Ministry spokesman Ali Reza Nikzad said a cyber attack targeting the country’s Oil Ministry and the National Iranian Oil Company had failed to affect any key data.

In early October 2010, Iran announced that it had detected and thwarted a cyber attack by the Stuxnet worm, which was reportedly created to infect Iranian industrial and nuclear computer systems.

Stuxnet, first indentified by the Iranian officials in June 2010, is a malware designed to infect computers using 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 ones used in the Bushehr plant, Iran’s first nuclear power plant.