Even before Iran launched missiles at Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops, security professionals warned of cyber retaliation for the U.S. drone strike killing Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani.
As The Washington Post reports, Iran’s potential options could include attacks that shut down power, wipe out financial data, or cripple hospital and transportation systems. Ransomware against U.S. companies with encrypted data or punitive attacks against contractors that work with the Trump administration may also be on the table.
John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis for the cybersecurity company FireEye, told the newspaper, “We’re in a more escalated situation than we’ve been in the past, and there are some serious questions about where the red lines are.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has warned Americans to “brush up” on Iranian cyber warfare, as The New York Times reports. While the department’s acting head said there were “no specific, credible threats,” the agency’s cybersecurity chief, Christopher C. Krebs, tweeted that you should “pay close attention to your critical systems” and “make sure you’re also watching third party accesses.”
As Bloomberg reports, in 2014, after billionaire conservative donor Sheldon Adelson appeared to call for detonating a nuclear explosive in Iran, an Iranian cyberattack did about $40 million in damage to Adelson’s Las Vegas casino servers. Since then, Iran’s cyber targets have included a U.S. presidential campaign, journalists, universities and a suburban New York dam. Milan Patel, chief client officer at the cybersecurity firm BlueVoyant, told the news service, “Power generation like hydro and electric, that’s where they can cause the most real world damage.”
Iran’s most likely form of cyber retaliation for Soleimani’s killing would be a so-called wiper attack, like the one against Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands corporation, aiming to take out as many computers as possible, reports Wired. But potential targets may also go beyond computer systems to include industrial control systems used in power grids and water systems. Peter Singer, a cybersecurity-focused strategist at the New America Foundation, told the magazine, “They have the capability to cause serious damage.”