U.S. carried out secret cyber strike on Iran after Saudi oil attack: officials

> 1) ever occurred 2) if it did occur, was it even the US 3) if it was even an attack, was it in fact a cyberattack at all

Relevant: U.S. Had Cyberattack Plan if Iran Nuclear Dispute Led to Conflict (2016) [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/world/middleeast/us-had-c...]

"Nitro Zeus was part of an effort to assure President Obama that he had alternatives, short of a full-scale war, if Iran lashed out at the United States or its allies in the region."

Tens of millions of dollars, thousands of people... That's not secrecy, just plausible deniability.

The China chip hacking story was an invented story by Bloomberg. Everyone else denied it including Apple as the customer, US government, the supplier of the chip etc. Bloomberg fabricated the story. Ever since, I do not trust Bloomberg as a reliable source of information.

The Houthi claimed responsibility, for starters. Also, as noted by Scott Ritter, 'there is the largest concentration of modern air defense radars in the Persian Gulf oriented toward Iran, and not one detected and tracked these launches?'

The Iran connection was immediately seized by both the USG and SA for their own purposes before the incident was even investigated. Both sides have motives that encourage fingering Iran. They promised to reveal the findings, but as of today, nothing further has been made public. This, despite the fact that the USG should have readily available sensor data that would show if the attack were to have originated in Iran, and if it were so, then that would be a causus belli for direct war on Iran, yet that dog never barked.

Doesn't matter. Cyber Command has a contingency plan, called Nitro Zeus, using cyber and other methods, to shut down the entire country of Iran. It's a full-scale attack in waiting.

When Nakasone and Cyber Command looked at what their digital weapons could contribute to the battle plan, they focused on the Iranian targets that they could reach by boring into the country's networks: Iran's air defense, its communications systems, and its power grid. Nitro Zeus would be the opening act of the war plan: turning off an entire country so fast that retaliation would have been extremely difficult. It was also, in the minds of some of its creators, a glimpse of the future. The idea was to plunge the target country into blackness and confusion from the very beginning of a conflict. That would give Israel and the United States time to bomb the many suspected nuclear sites, take pictures of how much damage was done, and if necessary bomb them again. But the hope was that Nitro Zeus would avert an all-out war, because the Iranians would, in theory, not be able to strike back. As part of the plan, Iran's missile capability would also have been targeted.

So, even as President Obama was worried about the vulnerability of America's electric grid, the United States was tunneling inside Iran's grid - along with its cell-phone network and even the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' command-and-control systems.

"This was pretty mind blowing to me," one former official said. "Here we were, going to work every day behind sealed doors, essentially trying to figure out if it was possible to cripple an entire nation's infrastructure without ever firing a shot or dropping a bomb. So we littered Iran's networks with malware," he said, a reference to the process of placing implants in key strategic systems that could, later on, be used to inject destructive code or simply turn the networks off.

"The hard part was keeping track of all of it," he said. Keeping track was tricky business because networks always change - and because there was no way to test Iran's vulnerabilities in field conditions. So Nakasone and the thousands of people at work on Nitro Zeus resorted to tabletop exercises, simulations of an attack. They tested and retested on a virtual model of Iran's networks to make sure that the implants were not visible to the Iranians and that collateral damage was limited. And they created answers from scratch to a series of questions: How do you take down the grid and keep it down? How about the air defenses? If the Iranians try to retaliate, how do you make sure they never get off the ground? "This was an enormous, and enormously complex, program," the former official said. "Before it was developed, the US had never assembled a combined cyber and kinetic attack plan on this scale."

Source: David E. Sanger, "The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age", Crown, NY, 2018, pp.39-44

That does not follow. "Decentralized" is not a defense against "penetrated by the NSA". It just means that it's more work - one attack doesn't give you the keys to everything.

On the other side, from the Iranian perspective, it means that systems are secured by different people from different organizations with different degrees of training. That's a recipe for a number of attackable systems.

We don't take away from the democratic process that which is hard to understand.

Your concern has been raised by politicians for hundreds of years.

All it would take (in the US) for the the representative congress to pass a new law which makes foreign cyber interference only permissible when passed by the the house and senate, similar to declarations of war.

There's "War is the continuation of Diplomacy by other means." - Carl von Clausewitz (Military theorist)

I think the counterargument would be that politics is the orderly handling of coercive force and authority.

When this orderly approach isn't sufficient, additional coercive force is added to the mix. At some point it starts to look like war.

To people on the wrong side of the political hierarchy, every day looks like war as armed troops (police) occupy neighborhoods seeking to enforce an externally imposed code that criminalizes normal, consensual behavior, confiscates wealth and property, and destroys civil society.

> when politicians fail to negotiate

In a sense, yes. If one politician demands that a foreign leader step down or face a US invasion, one can interpret the foreign leader's failure to step down as a breakdown in negotiations, but I think that is quite a stretch.

Yes, the phrase I used seems to be a common paraphrase.

“Put one of your cronies at the top of another country’s government”

Do you mean US meddling in Iran in 1953 or the other way around today?

Banks, heavy industry, big pharma are literally buying candidates for the government. Yet russia using trolls and leaking some emails is the biggest problem with elections... sounds like correct priorities.

In the framework outlined by Micheal Hayden in his blackhat keynote, offensive attacks like disabling missile batteries or power grids are acts of war, but espionage and intelligence gathering are on the table as what nation states just sort of do when idle.

You should really, really learn about the history of US involvement in the Iranian government before you state that. Like how we helped overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, to ensure we put in place a guy who was friendly to Great Brittan and the US. (Operation AJAX)

Can almost trace a line from that to the 1979 embassy hostage crisis, and the problems we have with Iran today.

Do you mean the Saudi refineries?

Russia at least was conducting a disinformation and agitprop attack during the 2016 election. That's not "hacking", exactly, but it's still something that matters quite a bit.

> The US isn't maintaining a constant and widespread campaign of industrial espionage and then feeding what they find to our own companies' R&D teams the way China is.

This is a rather naive notion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

They say that, but the if the reports of state-sponsored cyber attacks on the US or US companies over the past 10+ years is any indication, the "war" that's mentioned in the "acts of war" statement isn't tanks rolling through Beijing, Tehran, or Moscow.

If a cyber attack leads to war, it seems to lead to cyber war like this article. Not physical war.

Journalists without a long history of connections and experience, typically facilitated by the name/history of the "paper" they're working for, don't get to dig their heels in because they would lose access. Access is paramount, as is on record/off record confidentiality, and they are dependent on it, else they be blacklisted by their subjects of interest. All interviews and information sharing is voluntary, they can't force someone to answer a question, and they can't force someone to be interviewed, and they definitely can't force someone to tell the truth.

It is not their fault that they parrot whatever talking points politicians and their staff members. It's only on those rare occasions where sources are cultivated through long periods of time and building trust through publishing meticulously what information has been shared with them via interviews and documents, most of them being talking points of course, that they can get to the meat of the subjects. Lifting the veil of the real news stories requires years and years of trudging through just simply formatting interview transcripts into something readable and of interest.

I don't blame them one bit. It's a tough job and you're at the mercy of everyone you attempt to gather information from. It doesn't help that you're viewed as de-facto suspicious due to journalistic freedoms.