In Persian Gulf, computer hacking now a cross-border fear

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By: Jon Gambrell 

Tony Cole, Vice President of FireEye Inc., a cybersecurity firm headquartered in Milpitas, California, speaks at the FireEye Cyber Defence Live conference, Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. State-sponsored hacks have become an increasing worry among countries across the Persian Gulf. They include suspected Iranian cyberattacks on Saudi Arabia to leaked emails causing consternation among nominally allied Arab nations.

From suspected Iranian cyberattacks on Saudi Arabia to leaked emails causing consternation among nominally allied Arab nations, state-sponsored hacks have become an increasing worry among countries across the Persian Gulf.

Defending against such attacks has become a major industry in Dubai, as the city-state home to the world’s tallest building and the long-haul airline Emirates increasingly bills itself as an interconnected “smart city” where robots now deliver wedding certificates.

They fear a massive attack on the scale of what Saudi Arabia suffered through in 2012 with Shamoon, a computer virus that destroyed systems of the kingdom’s state-run oil company.

“It was and still is the worst physical attack we’ve ever seen,” said Tony Cole, a vice president at FireEye Inc., a cybersecurity firm headquartered in Milpitas, California. “Destruction was what the adversary had in mind.”

He added: “These are going to get worse as we look at more and more nation states that have some capability and quite literally they don’t care how they look on the world stage.”

Iran was the target of much of those fears and a point of discussion at an event Tuesday that Cole’s company held in Dubai. The Islamic Republic developed its cyber capabilities in 2011 after the Stuxnet computer virus destroyed thousands of centrifuges involved in Iran’s contested nuclear program. Stuxnet is widely believed to be an American and Israeli creation.

Iran is believed to be behind the spread of Stuxnet in 2012, which hit Saudi Arabian Oil Co. and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas. The virus deleted hard drives and then displayed a picture of a burning American flag on computer screens. Saudi Aramco ultimately shut down its network and destroyed over 30,000 computers.

A second version of Shamoon raced through Saudi government computers in late 2016, this time having the destroyed computers display a photograph of the body of 3-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, who drowned fleeing his country’s civil war. Suspicion again fell on Iran.