The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned us of Iran’s ability to carry out cyberattacks with disruptive effects against critical U.S. infrastructure. This important news came to us from The Hill in their article, “DHS issues bulletin warning of potential Iranian cyberattack.”
In the wake of the U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, DHS noted that while there was currently no information indicating a specific, credible threat, Iran possesses the ability to attack the U.S. in cyberspace.
The intelligence community has made note of Iran’s increasing abilities to carry out cyberattacks against the U.S. for most of the past decade, with Iran considered one of the top nation-state threats to the U.S. in cyberspace alongside Russia, China and North Korea.
Monitoring is happening for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) activity, and attacks such as ransomware activity. DDoS attacks involve taking down a system by flooding it with internet traffic requests, while ransomware attacks involve an individual locking a system and demanding money to give the user access again.
Melody K. Smith
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