Iran-US War Spreads to Persian Gulf Infrastructure; UAE: Iranian Missiles and Hackers Arrive Simultaneously

The UAE says attacks on its ports and energy facilities were cyber assaults, and in this regard experts warn that industrial systems connected to networks could be the next point of failure. Mohammed Al Kuwaiti, the UAE's head of cybersecurity, claimed at a media briefing earlier this month that […] wrote: Iran-US War Spreads to Persian Gulf Infrastructure; UAE: Iranian Missiles and Hackers

The United Arab Emirates says that the attacks on the country's ports and energy facilities were a type of cyber attack, and in this regard, experts warn that industrial systems connected to the network could be the next point of failure.

According to Wired, the head of cyber security of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammad Al-Kuwaiti, claimed at a media conference earlier this month that since the start of the war in Iran, every missile and drone attack on the country's ports, energy facilities and refineries has been accompanied by a cyber attack against the same target. He also said that the average number of digital attacks has tripled since February 28, reaching 600,000 to 800,000 attacks per day.

Various governments are facing a rapidly changing cyber threat landscape, from the signing of the Saudi Arabia-Pakistan Cyber Security Cooperation Agreement to regional leaders trying to find ways to deal with the growing threat posed by the US-Iran war, as well as the increasing role of artificial intelligence in cyber attacks.

Alex Maloof, founder of Narrative Shapers, a PR and communications consulting firm, points out two important facts.

"The first fact is that today there are many more threats," he says. Part of this issue is related to geopolitics, and another part is related to the fact that information technology has become the core of our lives, both personal and work. "The second reality is that artificial intelligence makes cybersecurity much more complex."

This threat is not only directed at governments and energy companies. "Attacks come from everywhere and affect both critical infrastructure and small and medium-sized enterprises and citizens," says Abdullah al-Jaber, a Saudi cyber security expert. According to him, these threats are "comprehensive and from all parts of the world" and indicate the continued increase in cyber activities.

For the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the wider Persian Gulf region, this threat becomes even more significant when operational technology (OT) systems are involved; Systems that monitor and control physical infrastructure such as power plants and power grids, water treatment systems, oil and gas facilities, ports and pipelines, transportation systems, and factories and industrial units.

The US-Iran war has shown how vulnerabilities in interconnected networks can weaken the resilience of critical infrastructure.

"These systems are supposed to be isolated from each other, but connected to the Internet," says Lee Rossey, chief technology officer and co-founder of the American cybersecurity company SimSpace. "So imagine an attacker from the outside gets into the OT network, probes it, moves around the network, gains access to a domain controller, steals a workstation's login information, comes back to the engineering workstation, and then manipulates a protocol that affects power generation." The war in the Persian Gulf has made these realities more concrete.

Earlier this year, Iranian hackers gained access to security cameras overlooking sites in Israel. Used to monitor targets, track Israeli troop movements, and assess damage from missile attacks, these cameras demonstrated how cyber operations can penetrate OT networks and play a role in supporting military operations. Similar attacks were carried out to compromise internet-connected cameras in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait.

In this regard, US cybersecurity officials claimed in July that Iran-linked cyber operatives had misused programmable logic controllers (PLCs), or industrial computers used to control physical processes, to disrupt critical infrastructure across the US.

"The assumption that manufacturing industries and all other systems are completely isolated from each other and not connected to information technology is breaking down more and more every day," says Rossi. Now the question is, how should the defense and response cover the entire network, cameras, power plants and other systems?"

The governments of the region are increasingly sharing information and joint preparation to deal with possible attacks and are focusing more on how countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates coordinate in response to these attacks. Rossi says that a number of companies are also investing in improving their cyber security because the war has shown that these threats are not hypothetical and far from reality.

"One of the issues that needs to be worked on is how to share information effectively, how to be more collaborative," he says.

and how to work together to understand the threat. They also face challenges in the field of artificial intelligence: how do I use it? Where do I use it? what does it mean How do I trust it? So they know this wave is coming, but this issue is not specific to this region."

Although the conflict in the Middle East has highlighted the growing importance of cyberspace as a new front for attacks, it is only the latest in a series of geopolitical conflicts and tensions that have demonstrated this fact. Previously, the war between Russia and Ukraine, the invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon by Israel, the tensions between the United States and China, as well as the increasing differences between the United Kingdom and the European Union with Russia, have all been associated with cyber activities. Therefore, governments and other actors try to access the networks, collect information and prepare themselves for possible conflicts.

"I think we're in a situation of a small, limited war," Rossi said. Where the parties have entered each other's networks, manipulated them, and taken similar actions, but these are more from the perspective of preparing, identifying and understanding the networks: Let me know the network. Let me know all about it. The question really is, when do I take malicious or malicious action against it? It is from that point that you enter the threshold of war and that is when you are at war.

Models being tested in an internal cybersecurity assessment bypassed controls designed to keep them isolated from the Internet and launched an automated cyberattack against Hugging Face, a collaborative online platform and community hub for machine learning and artificial intelligence, company OpenAI announced in July.

Rossi believes the incident paints a picture of a possible future in which AI-based attacks target targets such as critical infrastructure companies and governments.

He says: "When you have intelligent software that enters the network, finds information and various components, exploits, designs and moves in the network based on the vulnerabilities they discover, there is no longer a human in the loop to direct the movement, check different points and search the network. It is an autonomous worm that discovers and moves on its own. The great thing about these attacks is that they can move quickly. They can crush defenses. Here the reaction time is really shortened. "Many traditional attacks can take weeks to months to penetrate your network, but the more advanced these software become, the less time there is to explore the network, figure out what's going on, and respond."

When will attackers start using self-propagating worms to get into a network and take it down is the million dollar question!

"We'll get there at some point," Rossi says. He adds: “In my view, there will be small, limited wars going on in the network infrastructure; Autonomous offensive and defensive attacks will occur at the same time.

Cyber warfare in a world that is increasingly focused on artificial intelligence is something that governments around the world must inevitably get used to and take protective measures to deal with. However, according to al-Jaber, the US-Iranian war "may move the needle, but the flow of threats will not change."

"At the end of the day, if the power plant is still running, if the bank is still moving money, and if the hospital is still operating, I almost don't care if all these offensive and defensive attacks based on AI agents are happening behind the scenes," Rossi says.