Investigators began looking at the attacks several months ago, and when the Department of Homeland Security issued a vaguely worded warning this month, a government official told The New York Times that \u201cmost everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.\u201d They said the evidence was not specific enough to conclude with confidence that the attacks were state-sponsored, but control over the Internet is so centralized in Iran that they said it was hard to imagine the attacks being done without government knowledge. While the attackers have been unsuccessful to date, they have made enough progress to prompt the Homeland Security warning, which compared the latest threat to the computer virus that hit Saudi Aramco, the world\u2019s largest oil producer, last year.<\/p>\n
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The Obama administration has been focused on Iran because the attacks have given the Iranian government a way to retaliate for tightened economic sanctions against it, and for the American and Israeli program that aimed similar attacks, using a virus known as Stuxnet, on the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.<\/p>\n
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In a letter to the editor of The Times, responding to a May 12 article that reported on the new attacks\u2019 similarity to the Saudi Aramco episode, Alireza Miryousefi, the head of the press office of the Iranian mission to the United Nations, wrote that Iran \u201cnever engaged in such attacks against its Persian Gulf neighbors, with which Iran has maintained good neighborly relations.\u201d<\/p>\n
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American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their assertions of Iranian authorship of the latest attacks, but they describe the recent campaign as different from most attacks against American companies \u2014 particularly those from China \u2014 which quietly siphon off intellectual property for competitive purposes.<\/p>\n
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The White House would not confirm that Iran was the source, but Laura Lucas, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said that \u201cmitigating threats in cyberspace, whether theft of intellectual property or intrusions against our critical infrastructure\u201d was a governmentwide initiative and that the United States would consider \u201call of the measures at its disposal \u2014 from diplomatic to law enforcement to economic \u2014 when determining how to protect our nation, allies, partners, and interests in cyberspace.\u201d But Homeland Security was able to issue a broader warning because of an executive order, signed in February, promoting greater information sharing about such threats between the government and private companies that oversee the nation\u2019s critical infrastructure. It said the government was \u201chighly concerned about hostility against critical infrastructure organizations,\u201d and included a link to a previous warning about Shamoon, the virus used in the Saudi Aramco attack last year.<\/p>\n
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Government officials also say Iran was the source of a separate continuing campaign of attacks on American financial institutions that began last September and has since taken dozens of American banks intermittently offline, costing millions of dollars.<\/p>\n
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