Apart from sending over 120,000 US troops to the CENTCOM region, United States is also focusing its resources on a potential cyber attack which could cripple all major cities of Iran including disruption of military units and power grids.
The New York Times says that US military is planning to launch Nitro Zeus cyber attack on the nation of Iran in the 1st hours of the possible conflict to reduce the need to launch conventional attacks such as bombings and air strikes.
News is out that US acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan has presented a plan last Thursday in a meeting held in the white house on “ Border Iran Policy” and was attended by the state adviser John R Bolton, CIA director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
Now to those who aren’t aware of Nitro Zeus on a technical note, here are some details to enlighten your mind.
Nitro Zeus is actually a project name which was supposed to be a mitigation strategy aimed to be launched after the Stuxnet malware campaign. In layman terms, the project was to build computer systems with some in-built spying & cyber attacking software capabilities which remain hidden from the system users.
Yes, you have guessed it right! The Trump administration suspects that Chinese telecom products and services provider Huawei is said to be supplying 5G network equipment with in-built spying software which could cause serious concerns to the national security of the USA on the long run. For this reason, the 45Th US President Donald Trump has imposed a ban on the use of Huawei equipment in public and private organizations operating across North America last year.
Nitro Zeus is a technique where systems have in-built software capabilities induced into them during the design and build phase which makes it easy for hackers to launch effective cyber attacks against the system users remotely. Similar to botnets such devices can be used to launch attacks such as ransomware, DDoS and crypto mining malware distribution.
So, do such systems exist in Iran or the world making it easy for the USA to launch cyber attacks?
Yes, says Alex Gibney whose ‘Zero Days’ documentary film features Iran’s critical SCADA Infrastructure at risk of cyber attacks from foreign adversaries.
Hence, when will such attacks be launched on Iran or any such adversary by United States…?
Well, it’s a secret currently circulating among the top military officials of the United States for now.
