The Obama administration on Thursday indicted seven Iranians for a series of coordinated cyberattacks against the U.S. financial sector and for infiltrating a New York dam in 2013.
The unsealed indictment directly ties the seven alleged hackers to the Iranian government, claiming they were employed by computer security firms working on behalf of Tehran.
The charges are the first major public step the U.S. has taken to curb Iran’s rapidly developing cyber program, which has been pestering American companies with low-level hacks and probing for critical infrastructure network vulnerabilities for several years.
“Cybercriminals often think it’s a freebie to reach into the United States to do harm,” FBI Director James B. Comey said during remarks announcing the charges. “The message of this case is we will work together to shrink the world and impose costs on those people so that no matter where they are, we will try to reach them.”
The strikes on the financial sector, which occurred between late 2011 and mid-2013, left hundreds of thousands unable to connect to their accounts online, costing victims tens of millions of dollars.
Only one of the seven alleged hackers was charged with illegally accessing the control systems of the Bowman Dam in Rye, N.Y. — access that would have given him the ability to control water levels and flow rates.
Officials emphasized that the charges are intended to “send a powerful message” to foreign hackers.
“We will not allow any individual, group, or nation to sabotage American financial institutions or undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.
Some onlookers see the move as a targeted warning to Iran amid fears that Tehran would use a new influx of resources from its recently struck nuclear deal to fund cyber warfare efforts.
Iran’s economic sanctions were lifted in January, giving Tehran access to roughly $100 billion of its formerly frozen assets that can now be funneled into cyber and technology development.
To critics of the White House’s handling of Iran, though, the move confirms Obama’s long-standing failure to recognize the country’s cyberspace aggression.
“It is validation of what we had assessed … about the intent of the Iranian government: to probe and find vulnerabilities in American critical infrastructure,” said Fred Kagan, a national security scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and co-author of a recent report on the Iranian cyber threat.
The White House battled criticism throughout the nuclear talks that lifting sanctions would merely buttress Tehran’s military efforts and cyber warfare program, while failing to stop the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Source: HILL, March 25
