Iran: 5th Cyber Defense exhibition opens in Tehran.

The three-day event is organized by Iran's Civil Defense Organization, aims at providing the grounds for domestic players in the field of cyber security, electronic banking, industrial control systems, electronic security, and electromagnetics to showcase their latest developments and achievements. Platforms and conferences will also be held during the exhibition to help companies and aficionados meet and confer with investors. The event will continue through December 5.

Iran is believed to be the first nation to have come under a cyberattack. Operation Olympic Games was a covert and still unacknowledged campaign of sabotage by means of cyber disruption, directed at Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States and likely Israel (Illustration source: RevealNews)

The move comes in line with the government’s push to promote the domestic manufacturers’ role in supplying the country’s needs in different fields, especially in the field of cyber security. Iran is believed to be the first nation to have come under a cyberattack. Operation Olympic Games was a covert and still unacknowledged campaign of sabotage by means of cyber disruption, directed at Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States and likely Israel. As reported, it is one of the first known uses of offensive cyber weapons. Started under the administration of George W. Bush in 2006, Olympic Games was accelerated under President Obama, who heeded Bush's advice to continue cyber-attacks on the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. In relevant remarks in October, Head of Iran's Civil Defense Organization Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali said that former US President Barack Obama was the first-ever president who ordered and acknowledged the responsibility for the cyber-attacks against Iran's nuclear infrastructures.

As reported by Farsnews, Jalali told FNA that the former commander of the US cyber war proposed Obama to launch cyber-attacks against Iran's nuclear facilities, adding that Obama welcomed the idea and "for the first time a president admitted the responsibility for a cyber-attack against another country and then they attacked us". He, meantime, said that when the Americans studied the costs and benefits of the attacks after one year, they realized that the damage of the attack for themselves were more than what they had gained and therefore, they dismissed the commander.

In October 2014, General Jalali revealed that a US cyberattack on Iran's nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz failed due to his organization's tough defensive measures. "The first cyberattack, codenamed Olympic Games, was carried out on Natanz and was declared by the US President, but it met our heavy (defensive) response," Jalali told reporters in a press conference in Tehran.

Codenamed Olympic Games, the attacks were spearheaded by the US government under the Bush administration. Stuxnet targeted Siemens industrial equipment to spin hundreds of centrifuges beyond their breaking points and eventually disable Iran's nuclear efforts.
According to the report, Obama decided to speed up the attacks, even after the worm escaped from Iran's Natanz plant in 2010 and later ended up on the Internet.
During a meeting following the worm's escape, Obama even considered that the worm should be stopped thinking that America's most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran's nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised. Should we shut this thing down? Obama asked members of the President's national security team.

However, he finally decided to go ahead with the cyber-attacks. What followed thereafter was the Natanz plant being hit by several newer versions of the worm. The report is said to be based on 18 months of interviews with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program as well as with outside experts, who provided contradictory assessments of how successful the attack was in slowing down Iran's progress of developing nuclear weapons.

While internal Obama administration estimates claim the effort was delayed by 18 months to two years, some other experts, both inside and outside the government, said that Iran's enrichment levels had steadily recovered. A year later, Iran enriched uranium to the 20-percent grade, way beyond the 5-percent purity level that was done in Natanz in 2012.