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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

"The Bowman Avenue Dam in this low-key suburban village in Westchester County is … about the width of a modest living room, and the 20-foot-tall dam itself essentially keeps a babbling creek, the Blind Brook, from flooding basements and ground floors in houses downstream.

Yet, according to the authorities, it was the computer-guided controls of this dam that seven Iranian computer hackers chose to penetrate on behalf of that country’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, as part of a plot that also breached or paralyzed 46 of the nation’s largest financial institutions and blocked hundreds of thousands of customers from accessing their bank accounts online.

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It's weird how the news that agents of a foreign government were attempting to sabotage American infrastructure, which is -- I realize this is an antiquated notion nowadays -- an act of war, is received with shrugs and yawns and no real action. Imagine the screaming worldwide if hackers working for the CIA were breaking into Iranian dams and financial institutions.

Imagine the screaming worldwide if hackers working for the CIA were breaking into Iranian dams and financial institutions.

They broke into the Iranian nuclear program without much condemnation, so...

I recall a lot of wailing about how irresponsible they were deploying their sinister infrastructure-damaging war viruses, and such. But thinking about it more, I'll grant it depends on your perspective of the whole issue, so my point doesn't really stand.

I still find it dismaying that we so casually accept this state of affairs. There is no meaningful difference between attacks like this and a foreign agent setting fire to the bank building or physically sabotaging the dam.

There was some wailing from the computer security community, but nothing in the world of international diplomacy. And I'm sure that's why the USA isn't kicking up a fuss over this latest incident -- they want to avoid setting a precedent which would come back to haunt them the next time they're caught doing the same thing.

The US's cyber attacks on foreign countries are certainly the most funded and advanced campaigns of their kind. For reference here are the wikipedia pages of two of the most public pieces of malware your tax dollars have produced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware)

Both of these were directed primarily at Iran. And that second one, flame, has been described as "the most complex malware ever found."

> the news that agents of a foreign government were attempting to sabotage American infrastructure, which is -- I realize this is an antiquated notion nowadays -- an act of war, is received with shrugs and yawns

War is a big deal. You can't just rely on something meeting an old formal definition of "act of war"; to cause a war, there's got to be a risk of more damage (by some accounting) than we would do to ourselves by going to war.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Don't you remember Stuxnet? That is exactly what the us was doing! Surely it's been deniable, but who do you think did it?

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