Stuxnet And Flame Scare Critical Iranian Infrastructure Offline

Iran is set to take critical infrastructure offline next month, following highly sophisticated cyber attacks such as those carried out with the Stuxnet and Flame malware.

Reza Taghipour, the country’s telecommunications minister, said “one or two” countries who were hostile to Iran were controlling the Internet, making it untrustworthy, according to the Daily Telegraph.

It is believed the US and Israel have been cooperating on cyber attacks against Iranian infrastructure. Reports suggested they created Stuxnet, which was thought to have set Iran’s nuclear programme back two years, and Flame, which attempted to collect vast amounts of information from those working on the nation’s critical operations.

A ‘national intelligence network’

“The establishment of the national intelligence network will create a situation where the precious intelligence of the country won’t be accessible to these powers,” Taghipour told a conference on Sunday at Tehran’s Amir Kabir University.

Iran is planning on creating a domestic Internet, from which outside forces would be banned. Taghipour believes this intranet-esque system will be up and running within 18 months.

Just last week, Iran denied it became a victim of a virus that forced computers to play the AC/DC’s classic ‘Thunderstruck’, including infected systems helping run its nuclear programme.

The troubled nation has a history of Internet censorship. Reports earlier this year indicated Iran had begun blocking sites using the HTTPS secure protocol, effectively censoring major bank sites, Google, Gmail, Facebook and many other commercial sites.

Earlier this year, Iran sentenced Saeed Malekpour, an Iranian-born web programmer living in Canada until his 2008 arrest, after one of his web programs was used to post pornographic images without his knowledge.

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