Pierluigi Paganini
September 09, 2015
According to a recent report, more than 10,000 Internet security attacks are detected by cyber security experts in Iran every day, a country that is spending a significant effort to improve its cyber capabilities.
In March 2015, The British Business Insider published an interesting post on the Iranian cyber capabilities, according to the experts the Government of Teheran is improving expertise in the cyber domain faster than experts ‘would have ever imagined,’ increasing cyber-security spending 12-fold since 2013.
Today Iran ranks 19th in terms of cyber security on a global scale, the country has accomplished only 39 percent of a target 53 percent of its Information Security Management System (ISMS) and 20 percent of a target 100 percent for launching a national Security Operation Center SOC.
The situation presented by the Iranian experts is worrying, according to the cyber security experts of the country. The country is a privileged target of foreign spies and hackers, despite the significant commitment to cyber security of the Government of Teheran, the national infrastructure still suffers the foreign offensive.
According to the Iranian authorities, the Stuxnet attack in September 2013 infected more that 30,000 machines completely changing the perception of cyber threat of the central Government.
The last attack in order of time attributed by the Iranian authorities to state-sponsored hackers relied on the Dino malware, a malicious agent that targeted most systems of the country.
In July, ESET published a detailed analysis of the Dino malware, the ESET researcher Joan Calvet has detected a single sample of Dino in the wild that was used in an attempt to infect a target in Iran in 2013.
“Dino is so hard to find because the group behind the Animal Farm is really good at targeting people precisely, and we basically miss a lot of their samples,” Calvet told
Dino is a modular malware, a number of components allow it to carry out several tasks for cyber espionage operations.
It doesn’t surprise that most cyber-attacks against Iran are launched from Israel as explained by the IT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi.
“IT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi has said most of cyber-attacks against Iran are launched from Israel. According to Vaezi, a number of Western and Arab countries rank behind Israel in launching cyber-attacks on Iran.” reported the Trend News Agency.
Behnaz Arya, director of the Cyberspace Security Exchange Department of the Tehran Computer Guild, explained that budget assigned to research and development is not adequate to meet requirements of the country and to reach the goal established by the government cyber strategy.
According to Arya, the lack of awareness at the organizational level is the principal cause for critical security issues for the posture of the country in the cyberspace.
Hossein Samimi, director of the Technological Development at the Ministry of IT, explained that despite banking systems are the critical infrastructure of the county, In Iran banking facilities given to the cyber security section last year comprised 19.5 percent of the entire facilities given to IT companies.
I was personally convinced that the Iranian Government will continue to grow in term of cyber security, reaching the goals of confirming itself as one of the most dangerous countries in the cyberspace.
Let me close with a consideration …. 10,000 Internet security attacks per day are probably the tip of the iceberg, numerous APT campaigns are still going undetected.
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(Security Affairs –Iran, cyber security)
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