From: FARS News Agency (Iran)

TEHRAN (FNA)- The enemy is developing, mastering and using the hi-tech to strike at Iran and Tehran should adopt a smart civil and cyber defense strategy against this approach, Head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali said.

Addressing a ceremony in Tehran on Sunday, Jalali said his organization aims to harness and reduce threats against Iran, “so, threats determine the direction of our movement”.

Noting that the threats in the cyber space are changing qualitatively and quantitatively, he said that the enemy is enhancing its technologies using smart systems to have their control wherever these technologies are used.
Then, technologies have become a tool of power in today world, he said, and added that most of the world’s new technologies and systems enjoy an IT system to compile and send reports to the producer of that technology.

“I think that utilizing hi-tech is like playing in enemy’s court because it has been developed based on the capabilities of the enemy,” Jalali said.

He then said the US and Israel own a major share of infrastructural companies and hi-tech firms to the very same end. “Thus, Iran is necessitated to design a new model for cyber defense,” he said, adding that such a civil defense model should not be a conventional and symmetric one, given the aforementioned facts.

Over the past few years Iran had been the target of numerous cyber attacks, which had been carried out to disrupt the country’s industrial systems, but Iranian experts had been able to successfully monitor and counter the threats.

In May, Iran announced that its cyber experts detected and contained a complicated Israeli spy virus known as “Flame”.

The head of Information Technology Organization of Iran, Ali Hakim Javadi, said earlier that the country’s experts had managed to produce anti-virus software that could spot and remove the detected computer virus “Flame”.

Javadi said that the indigenous anti-virus software had been capable of detecting the virus and cleaning up the infected computers.

He said that the malware was different from other viruses and was more destructive than Stuxnet.

On April 24, an Iranian oil official said the country’s experts had contained cyber attacks against the country’s Oil Ministry.

Hamdollah Mohammadnejad, deputy minister in engineering affairs, said “Recently, a few number of National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) servers were attacked by a malware, but the cyber security experts of oil industry contained it immediately.”

In October 2010, Iranian Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi announced that Iran had detected and thwarted a virus aimed at infecting the country’s nuclear plant system.

Iran said the computer worm, Stuxnet, had infected some IP addresses in Iran, including the personal computers of the staff at the country’s first nuclear power plant, Bushehr. Tehran said Israel and the US were behind the infection of its industrial sites.