Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
Not really the time or place to try to score cheap political points.
Well said, Dave.
@Ninthace: spot on. The value of the target is the concern.
Originally Posted by
foxmoth
now he has started it he needs to finish it!
What does "finish it" mean to you? The US has been quite clear that they are not putting boots on the ground.
Fortune magazine has an interesting look at the cyber war piece...(this is excerpted from the larger article).
Originally Posted by Fortune
As strikes hit Tehran on Saturday morning, millions of Iranians got a strange push notification on their phones. The BadeSaba Calendar
prayer app, which has more than 5 million downloads, had been compromised, and the app issued alerts saying, “Help has arrived!” and called for a “People’s Army” to defend their “Iranian brothers,” according to an assessment from cyber intel firm Flashpoint. On Sunday, the app sent with surrender instructions for rank-and-file members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and safe locations for protesters to gather.
Then regime loyalists quickly struck back.
According to Flashpoint, what followed on Sunday was the “most aggressive” use so far of what’s known as Iran’s “Great Epic” cyber campaign, which is a loosely coordinated group of cyber operatives under a channel called the “Cyber Islamic Resistance.” Under the group’s umbrella, various cyber attackers have shut down gas
stations in
Jordan, and led attacks against U.S. and Israeli military providers to destroy data as well as conduct psychological operations mimicking the BadeSaba
hack.
The next 48 hours are likely to be a period of “extreme volatility” where hacktivists and proxies “take the lead in escalation to fill the vacuum left by Tehran’s central command,” Flashpoint noted in an update. These actors are allegedly using Telegram and Reddit as a coordination hub, posting screenshots of alleged attacks as proof, although it takes weeks and sometimes months to verify accuracy, said Kathryn Raines, a former NSA expert who is now a threat intel team lead at Flashpoint.
As to the blue on blue with Kuwait: fog of war, glad they all got out of their Mudhens. As the USAF looks into this, I predict that somewhere in the findings will be "what we have here is failure to communicate" or something similar.