Iranian MPs Urge Legal Action against US Cyber Attackers

In the letter, the parliamentarians have asked the Judiciary to begin legal proceedings against US hackers for acts of sabotage against Iran, Abouzar Nadimi told Tasnim.

The main point of the letter is to counter harmful actions by American hackers against Iran’s nuclear facilities and power plants, he added.

The MPs seem to have written the letter in reaction to a recent decision by the US Justice Department, which announced on March 24 that it has indicted seven hackers associated with the Iranian government.

It is the first time the US has charged state-sponsored individuals with hacking to disrupt the networks of key US industries. The charges include attacking US banks’ public websites from late 2011 through May 2013 and with breaking into a computer system at a small dam in Rye, NY, in an apparent attempt to disrupt its operation.

On the other hand, Iran has already suffered a cyber damage when the Stuxnet virus affected a number of its nuclear facilities.

On June 1, 2012, The New York Times revealed that Stuxnet was part of a wave of sophisticated digital attacks codenamed “Olympic Games,” which US President Barack Obama had ordered against the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities.

The paper also confirmed that the Stuxnet virus was created with the help of a secret Israeli intelligence unit.

Iranian experts, however, detected and neutralized the malware in time, averting an extensive damage to the country’s industrial sites and facilities.