NATO’s cyberwarfare center says cyber attacks launched against the Islamic Republic of Iran by the US and Israel constituted “an act of force” and were illegal under international law.
According to The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, commissioned by NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Estonia, “Acts that kill or injure persons or destroy or damage objects are unambiguously uses of force,” The Washington Times reported on Sunday.
Michael D. Schmitt, the manual’s lead author and professor of international law at the US Naval War College in Newport, said the group of researchers who wrote the manual all agreed that the use of Stuxnet virus, that attacked Iran’s cyber structures in 2009, was an act of force.
Washington and Tel Aviv are believed to have jointly developed the malware, although neither has accepted responsibility for the attack.
Iran has been the target of several cyber attacks over the past few years.
In June 2012, a report by the Washington Post said the US and the Israeli regime had cooperated in creating the computer virus Flame to spy on Iran. US National Security Agency, the CIA and the Israeli military worked together to create the Flame virus, the paper added.
In addition, the New York Times also revealed in the same month that US President Barack Obama secretly ordered a cyber attack with the Stuxnet computer virus against Iran in 2010 to sabotage the country’s nuclear energy program.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyber weapons,” the report said.
In response to such attacks, Iran launched a cyber defense headquarters tasked with preventing computer worms from breaking into or stealing data from the country’s maximum security networks, including nuclear facilities, power plants, data centers, and banks.
March 25, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Cyberwarfare, Flame, Iran, Israel, NATO, Obama, United States |
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Obama administration touts cybersecurity while conducting cyber warfare
While routinely touting the necessity for tighter controls over the Internet in the name of cybersecurity, the U.S. government has again been caught creating computer viruses to wage cyber warfare in the Middle East.
Researchers working for both Kaspersky and Symantec have separately discovered that the United States is almost certainly responsible for three new viruses that are being used in Lebanon and Iran to conduct espionage, having already been identified as the culprits behind the 2010 Stuxnet virus and this year’s closely related Flame virus.
Kaspersky and Symantec experts are still unsure as to what the newly discovered viruses are designed to do, but have confirmed that they are operating in the Middle East, including Iran and Lebanon, and that the, “approach to uploading packages and downloading data fits the profile of military and/or intelligence operations.”
The new viruses, programs code-named SP, SPE and IP, use malware packages that try to “communicate with command and control servers.” The new viruses could be offshoots of the Flame virus or completely different pieces of software.
“The findings are likely to bolster a growing view that the U.S. government is using cyber technology more widely than previously believed to further its interests in the Middle East,” reports Haaretz.
“The United States has already been linked to the Stuxnet Trojan that attacked Iran’s nuclear program in 2010 and the sophisticated Flame cyber surveillance tool that was uncovered in May.”
As the Washington Post reported earlier this year, the United States and Israel were also responsible for jointly developing the Flame virus, a huge malware assault that monitored Iran’s computer networks.
Despite months of inaccurate speculation blaming Russia or China for the outbreak of the 2010 Stuxnet virus, it was eventually admitted by the New York Times that, “US and Israeli intelligence services collaborated to develop a destructive computer worm to sabotage Iran’s efforts to make a nuclear bomb.”
The U.S. government’s continual efforts to develop computer viruses as a tool of cyber warfare might be more palatable were it not for the constant push by the executive and legislative branches to censor and regulate the Internet domestically in the name of cybersecurity.
Urging President Obama last month to pass an executive order that critics have denounced as another federal power grab over the Internet, Senator Jay Rockefeller justified the EO by claiming it was needed “to protect this country from the cyber threat,” even as the U.S. simultaneously launches aggressive cyber warfare campaigns against other countries.
Indeed, viruses created by the United States and Israel have even been cited as proof that restrictive cyber security legislation needs to be rubber stamped – by the very same government allied with the intelligence networks creating the viruses.
As we reported back in 2011, despite initial evidence clearly indicating the U.S. and Israel were behind the Stuxnet attack, a fact that was subsequently confirmed, major news websites still parroted the official narrative that Russia or China were to blame, even going to the lengths of ridiculing anyone who suggested otherwise as paranoid conspiracy theorists.
While claiming that it needs more power over the world wide web to prevent the spread of hostile computer viruses that could cripple U.S. infrastructure and sensitive networks, the U.S. government itself is creating those very same computer viruses to spy on and attack infrastructure and sensitive networks in other countries.
September 18, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Flame, Stuxnet, United States |
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