Taqipour told reporters on Wednesday that cyber attacks used to be launched by hackers but now they are being carried out by certain governments and said, “The Islamic Republic of Iran has complained to international bodies over state-sponsored cyber attacks [against the country].”
He referred to the recent cyber attacks against Iran, termed as ‘state cyberterrorism’, and said the Iranian Foreign Ministry has complained to the relevant organizations.
The minister said that at expert meetings including the conference on information technology in Geneva, Switzerland also the Iranian representative has officially conveyed Tehran’s objection to the attacks.
He said that cyber attacks were sponsored by specific governments and added the newly detected computer virus Flame, for instance, was mainly sponsored by the Israeli regime and certain Western countries.
This comes as a report by The Washington Post said that the US and Israel have cooperated in creating the computer virus Flame to spy on Iran.
“The malware was designed to spy on Iran’s computer networks and send back intelligence used for an ongoing cyberwarfare campaign”, the daily reported on Tuesday.
US National Security Agency, CIA and Israel’s military worked together to create the Flame virus, the newspaper added.
Earlier this month, The New York Times also revealed that US President Barack Obama secretly ordered a cyber attack with the Stuxnet computer virus against Iran 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 New York Times quoted “participants in the program” as saying.
The Russian computer security firm Kaspersky Lab, one of the world’s top virus-hunting agencies, said last week that there are strong links between the Flame and Stuxnet worm as the two include a unit that originates from the same source code.
AR/HGH/AZ
Views: 0