Iran is reportedly mobilising an army of cyber hackers in response to a series of online attacks in 2010.
These attacks were said to have badly hit the country's nuclear enrichment site at Natanz and, now, Iran is moving towards retaliation. This will potentially involve the Passive Defence Organization, which is led by Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali.
In comments made to the Bultannews website and quoted in subsequent reports, he appeared to be actively seeking new recruits, stating: "Regarding the cyber issue, we welcome the presence of those hackers who are willing to work for the goals of the Islamic Republic with good will and revolutionary activities."
In separate comments quoted by Fox News, Jalali outlined the scale of these planned Iranian cyber attacks. The Islamic Republic, he said, intended "to fight our enemies with abundant power in cyberspace and Internet warfare."
It's possible there will be a long line of candidates keen to be involved in this project. Internet censorship is in place in Iran, but that doesn't stop large numbers of teenagers blogging and networking. In order to do so, they're knowingly bypassing the laws of the land and, according to some, Iran's younger generation potentially includes the hackers of the future.
The potential's also there for IT technicians and others to feed the cyber hacking army without realising it, according to ex-Iranian Revolutionary Guard Mohsen Sazegara.
"Computer experts working on piecemeal projects wouldn't even necessarily know they were working on a government cyber attack plan", he told Fox."It's a process. They write complicated programs and divide and subdivide the work in such a way that even a highly qualified person might not know the end results. So they can recruit many people who would not know that the end result of their work might be a computer worm."
Iran already has a dedicated cyber warfare organisation up and running. Iran's Cyber Army, as it's known, has claimed it's been behind multiple recent attacks including, reportedly, one on the Voice of America. Information on Iran's Cyber Army is sketchy - we don't know who heads it, who supports it and where it's based (not necessarily Iran).
A bigger question, though, is what form the Iranian cyber attacks take from here on in. Security Technology will present updated coverage on this subject in future News Items.
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