Iran will strongly respond to any cyber attacks: Iranian official

TEHRAN,July 26(MNA) – An official at the Cyber Command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces Headquarters said that the Islamic Republic will give a strong response to any possible cyber attacks on the country’s nuclear facilities. “They should take seriously (Iran’s) doctrine of threat against threat and should be aware that Iran will give a proper response to any act of defiance,” Iranian news agencies quoted the unnamed official as saying in response to news reports about possible cyber attacks by the United States on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “U.S. officials should prevent such hostile and inexpert remarks from being made, otherwise they will suffer the repercussions of them,” he stated. In recent years, Iran has been the target of several major cyber attacks, which have successfully been repelled. In September 2010, it was reported that the Stuxnet worm, which is capable of taking over power plants, had infected some industrial sites in Iran. In April 2011, Iranian officials announced that the country had been targeted by a new computer worm named Stars. Later, news agencies reported that another computer worm named Duqu had targeted some Iranian organizations and companies. On May 28, Reuters reported that security experts had discovered a new data-stealing spyware virus dubbed Flame that had lurked inside thousands of computers in several Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, for as long as five years as part of a sophisticated cyber warfare campaign. The New York Times reported on June 1 that from his first months in office, U.S. President Barack Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding the United States’ first sustained use of cyberweapons.