TECH

US analysts denouncing alleged Russian attacks now speak of 'Iranian hackers'

Iranian hackers are threatening US computer systems, security firms FireEye and CrowdStrike said, as tensions between Washington and Tehran cooled down after the two countries were on the brink of war.
"Actually, we're seeing an augmented cyber activity that seems to be facing the West," Adam Meyers, vice president of Intelligence at CrowdStrike, told Politico. "In early June, mid-June is when it really started kicking off."
Ben Read, senior spy analyst at FireEye, confirmed the timeline and told the site that the latest campaign is led by a group of Iranian hackers connected to the government known as APT33 or "Refined Kitten."
Wired magazine ran a report on Thursday also alleging Iranian attacks, based on information from CrowdStrike and another company, Dragos - this time targeting the US Department of Energy with phishing emails pretending to come from the Council of Economic Advisers White House.
"The Department of Energy is aware of the reports of the APT activity and, for security reasons, we do not comment on the current cybernetic activity targeting the Department's networks," the agency said in a statement.
CrowdStrike is the contractor who accused Russia of invading the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016. Federal investigators only believed it, never scrutinizing the DNC's computers.
FireEye also accused Russia of attempting to hack the Democrats, this time during the 2018 elections. The company also chose Hillary Clinton - the private email server in attic fame - as the keynote speaker at her next cyber security conference in October.
Iranian cyber war allegations occurred when almost everyone in Washington was expecting some form of US military action against Tehran following the killing of a US spy plane over the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday.
A war seems to have been avoided at the moment, with President Donald Trump saying on Friday that he changed his mind about a "disproportionate" response just minutes before the operation was in progress. S. N.