The good thing about cyber-warfare and cyber-attacks is twofold: One, they never happened. Two, when they happen, they didn't cause real warfare because they never happened.
What didn't happen this time, spooks tell the papers, is that some big Western country didn't send in computer worms to cripple attacks against shipping that Iran wasn't contemplating. So, friends all around!
Apparently those running the government and the Revolutionary Guard in Iran haven't been plotting more attacks against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. So a Western government of some note didn't sabotage their computers and didn't wipe out their databases, particularly not wiping out the programs that tracked oil shipments in and around the Middle East. We know they didn't because nobody admitted it on the front pages of the papers last week.
This unmentioned, particular, stateside, Western government and Iran have long been involved in an undeclared conflict among the computer types for years. That is, they haven't been. Not officially.
We hope we've made ourselves obscure. America's spies certainly have.
It turns out that all the years of empty talk from Western diplomats and negotiators, among other distinguished types, are nothing compared to a quick chop to the motherboard. The American military even has a new branch of the armed forces, joining infantry, armor and artillery: It's called the U.S. Cyber Command. These days, it can do more harm than any artillery battalion.
Over the years, all the talk out of Washington or at the United Nations made few impressions on the mullahs in Tehran. But when their computers, especially the ones tracking boats in the Persian Gulf, went dark, that made an impression. Apparently. For on this subject, neither side talks on the record.
We've been kindly disposed toward worms since childhood when we'd find them on the sidewalks after rains. Worms have superpowers. That is, they have remarkable powers of replication. But the kids back in the day probably never thought worms could be used as a forces for peace in the world. More likely, those worms were used as forces of upheaval--as when we'd chase one of the little kids with one.
We don't know the name of the latest bug given to the Iranians. We didn't know the name "Stuxnet" right away either. But it did a lot of harm to Iranian computers in 2010. Which meant a lot of good to the planet.
Some of us would like to think that once these worms get into the software, there's no stopping their powers of duplication. And those running the Revolutionary Guard will have to throw out all the hardware and start from scratch. And while they're doing that, shipping goes on, oil moves to market, and the world isn't at war. All we are saying is give Cyber Command a chance.
Will it work?
Well, according to The New York Times, no tankers have been targeted in significant covert attacks since the June 20 worm release, and, "Though the effects of the June 20 cyber-operation were always designed to be temporary, they have lasted longer than expected, and Iran is still trying to repair critical communications systems and has not recovered the data lost in the attack . . . ."
We'd call that a job well done.
Even if it wasn't really done. Officially.
Worms, as any biologist can tell you, do useful work. Sometimes they might even save the world.
Editorial on 09/03/2019