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

[wil421]

For the people commenting about leakers and things being secret in the past, I’ll bet money the government leaked this themselves.

[notlukesky]

The more important problem is that we don’t even know if this attack: 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 (you would want to protect actual human assets who do physical damage in say industrial control systems as an insider job by saying it was a remote attack using some sort of zero day attack)

Anonymous government sources, especially in cyber security, have a track record of persistent lying

Remember the China chip hacking story by Bloomberg built on anonymous government sources. The alleged fake news was never retracted - even though it was technically not a possible attack if you know how chips are made. (There are chips that had arguably deliberately installed flaws - the Intel chip with the OTP generator that was trivially crackable and the RSA keyfob with the default NSA backdoor).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

https://siliconangle.com/2018/10/22/apple-amazon-super-micro...

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/rsa-advisory-nsa-algorithm/

[Ididntdothis]

Don’t forget that “the government “ consists of many departments full of people with conflicting interests. What one part may view as useful could be viewed by another part as treason.

[_ea1k]

Yeah, that definitely happens from time to time. Here is a pretty famous case from recent history: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-24/trump-ass...

[davidwitt415]

Apropos to the Noam Chomsky 'Manufacturing Consent' thread, the USG and Corporate Media have enshrined the false narrative that this was an Iranian attack. While Iran is supporting the Yemenis, independent military analysts agree that Yemen had the capabilities to carry out the attack, and it came from Yemen. Furthermore, no real evidence has been provided to tie Iran to the attack.

Also carefully glossed over is that the Saudis started a war of aggression against Yemen, one of the poorest countries on earth, fully supported by US arms and military. The claims of Iranian support for Yemen are dwarfed by the overt support of Saudi Arabia by the USG.

[akvadrako]

What's the evidence it came from Yemen? Are they claiming the images released by SA are faked? What about the claim the attacks came from the North?

So far I haven't seen any evidence from either side.

[HenryKissinger]

There's not much anyone not in the know can say. We know Cyber Command and the NSA work together to penetrate adversarial networks. They are also very reluctant to share anything about their activities. They apparently wiped out the Iranian computers that were used to target the drone they shot down in the summer. We don't know how deep Cyber Command has embedded itself in the Iranian government's digital infrastructure. They have probably gone very, very far.

[igivanov]

Not likely at all. The Iranian defence structure is highly decentralized.

[ape4]

Used to be that "secret" things stayed secret for 30 years or so.

[hos234]

Probably want Iran to not assume it's coming from Israel/Saudi etc...but then again these days people are crazy addicted to getting those like/click/view counts and I wouldn't be the least surprised if the Intel/Military community isn't immune. Can see two Generals competing for Likes somewhere.

[archgoon]

"Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"

[resters]

To zoom out slightly, consider the famous phrase war is politics with guns.

Would it ever be the case that war is politics with cyber strikes?

As the article points out, the strikes were politically motivated (against Iran's regime), but were they an act of war?

Under what circumstances should the American people tolerate an act of war being carried out on their "behalf"?

In my view, the democratic process should be used to prevent the US from doing "warmaking" that is not broadly supported by the public.

In fact, as it is well known, the framers required congress to declare war.

So what is the purpose of the US conducting such a strike done without democratic consent?

My guess is that it was conducted to help nudge the American people into accepting acts of war by executive fiat against Iran, when the legal justification for them is at risk of being removed via the democratic process (1). The house passed a bill requiring congressional authorization, but the senate did not.

So we can view the cyber strike as the executive branch asserting its power to make war against Iran without the sort of missiles and bombs that make Americans easily think of it as war.

1. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/19/18691936/h...

[mccr8]

I think the phrase you may be thinking of is the more poetic "War is the continuation of politics by other means" by Carl von Clausewitz.

[randomsearch]

> war is politics with guns

Never heard that phrase before, but I wouldn't agree with it. Politics is all about compromise: the art of the possible. It's negotiation. War often happens when politicians fail to negotiate.

[daveslash]

>> In my view, the democratic process should be used to prevent the US from doing "warmaking" that is not broadly supported by the public.

I would agree with you on principle. In practice, I'm not sure that the general public is capable of really understanding or digesting the concepts of cyber-warfare. At least, not in a way that would lend itself well to the democratic process. Unfortunately.

[everdrive]

Was there any measurable effect? I'm not convinced anything was accomplished here.

[tracker1]

The fact is, it's all complicated... Since (and before) stuxnet, cyber warfare has escalated and the number of (presumed) state actors is present pretty much everywhere. The attacks are constant and don't stop. Anyone doing cyber security in an international or government system experiences this daily.

[Aperocky]

Is it me or does it feel hypocritical of the US government when it constantly cry about cyber operation from China and Russia while conducting (probably a lot more than this certain case) and leaking cyber operation of US?

Like, if everyone including yourself is knee deep and slinging mud, don't accuse other people for being dirty.

[gherkinnn]

Of course governments seem hypocritical.

Until you realise that every large entity, be it governmental or private, practices realpolitik quite consistently.

[hannasanarion]

Responding to a missile attack by screwing with the attacker's missile targeting systems is not really comparable to attacking an election to put one of your cronies at the top of another country's government.

[papreclip]

We are by no means "knee deep" the way the Chinese are. 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. If it were merely 'spies spying on spies', we wouldn't be hearing about it. As it is, very little actually gets attributed to China, and instead news agencies seem to pick the safe targets of North Korea and Russia

The crying about Russia has become party politics. There's no putting that cat back in the bag

[hanniabu]

Yeah, that's propaganda only show the citizens one half of the coin.

There's still no doubt in my mind that the US was the one that bombed their refineries.

[magashna]

It really would be nice if we were all honest with each other. Unfortunately it takes one bad actor to exploit everyone else, so instead we're always needing to watch our backs and poke others.

[mc32]

Depends on if it’s reactionary or provocative.

[lostmsu]

I would treat any cyberattacks damaging infrastructure as acts of war.

Question is, in Iran, is it a part of pre-existing war?

[rebuilder]

I could swear there was speculation about precisely this just after the strikes. Anyone remember it?

[thrower123]

Much better than the ill-advised military strike that so many foreign policy demons were lusting for.

It bothers me a lot that so many foreign policy experts can look at the unrelieved mess of things that they have made over the past generation, and think that this time, doing what has failed spectacularly so many times before is going to work out.

Time to invent some new wheels.

[monocasa]

Micheal Hayden said during his Blackhat keynote that the US considers offensive cyber attacks from nation states to be acts of war, so probably not that much better.

[seqastian]

And it was kept secret until now? So I guess they haven't told trump about it?

[tupshin]

Given their absurdly similar phrasings, I'm pretty certain both of the responses you got from this were bots. Or else two idiots with their own version of a copy pasta.

[parasanti]

This "anonymous source" who is disclosing classified information should be punished. This is not good for anyone.

[_ea1k]

It isn't always that simple. The government sometimes discloses such information intentionally with an agreement that the briefer's name is not disclosed.

[situational87]

This is half the newspaper nowadays. Every journalist just repeats what some official with an impressive job title says and nobody gets to question why the story is being pushed by this person because they are never identified. It's naive to call for prosecution, this story was almost surely leaked and approved by the US State Department before it was written.

Journalists should really dig their heels in and start resisting this, but that will never happen. It's just bad journalism and they keep letting themselves get manipulated.

I don't even care about the classified information aspect of this, the classification system in the US is a complete farce and will be reformed soon, clearly nobody respects it all anymore at any level of the intel community.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

>This is not good for anyone.

Except those who don't support such a strike (e.g Iran).