A series of potentially destructive cyber attacks seeking to sabotage corporations in the U.S. has been tracked back to Iran, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing American officials and corporate security experts.

American oil, gas and electricity companies, which government officials refuse to identify, have been targeted by the attacks.

Government officials said that the attacks were designed to destroy data and manipulate machinery that operates critical control systems, like oil pipelines. While the attacks have been unsuccessful so far, they made enough progress to warrant a warning from the Department of Homeland Security.

Referring to a months-long investigation into the cyber campaign, a government official told the New York Times that “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.”

Government officials and outside experts confirmed that the source of the attacks have been narrowed down to Iran, as was previously reported in the Wall Street Journal. The evidence isn't strong enough to unequivocally indicate that the attacks were sponsored by the Islamic Republic, the officials said, but due to the fact that control over the Internet is so centralized in Iran it is unlikely that they were perpetrated without Tehran's knowledge.

The officials told The New York Times that the attacks suggest that Iran’s hacking skills have improved over the past 18 months. The attacks are viewed as the Iranian government's retaliation for the tightened economic sanctions that have been imposed on it, and for the American and Israeli cyber program that unleashed a virus dubbed Stuxnet on the Natanz nuclear plant.

That joint U.S.-Israeli effort, code-named Olympic Games, slowed Iran’s nuclear progress for months, but also prompted it to create a cyber corps to defend the country from such viruses.

The wave of attacks on U.S. firms follows similar attempts made last year to hack Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, and RasGas, the Qatari energy company. American officials have attributed both attacks to Iran.

Iran has denied being the source of any attacks, adding that it had been a victim of American sabotage.

Government officials have also said Iran was the source of a separate ongoing series of attacks on financial institutions in the U.S., which began last September and has since taken dozens of American banks intermittently offline. However, these attacks are a less sophisticated effort, according to the report.

http://www.infonubia.com/2013/05/cyber-attacks-on-us-energy-firms.html