Right, sure. (Photo: How Stuff Works)

Iran is on a technological roll this week. First a scientist announced that he'd invented a time machine (never mind that it was more like a 12-year-old girl's paper fortune teller). Now comes the news that the country is working on its very own "Islamic Google Earth." It'll be called Basir, Farsi for "spectator," and it's scheduled to debut in four months.

And no, it’s definitely not just a sticker on a piece of glass, either. That would be silly.

According to the Guardian, the country's minister for information and communications technology, Mohammad Hassan Nami, recently informed the Mehr news agency that, "we are currently creating an appropriate data centre which could be capable of processing this volume of information."

It's not too clear, though, what makes the service "Islamic," as opposed to a mere rip-off. Mr. Nami said:

"We are developing this service with the Islamic views we have in Iran and we will put a kind of information on our website that would take people of the world towards reality … Our values in Iran are the values of God and this would be the difference between Basir and the Google Earth, which belongs to the ominous triangle of the US, England and the Zionists [a reference to Israel]."

So, guess they can't let any images of couples doin' it sneak onto the servers?

Now, if they follow the clone playbook, soon we can expect Iran to roll out an Islamic Kickstarter, an Islamic BirchBox, and an Islamic Airbnb, just like when people decide to make porn versions of everything. But why should you bother making the switch? In a word: paranoia.

"On the surface, Google Earth is providing a service to users, but in reality security and intelligence organisations are behind it in order to obtain information from other countries," Nami said.

Eric Schmidt, international man of mystery? We knew it.

Not even close! (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Tsk, tsk: Doesn't anyone have any respect for basic science fictional concepts any more? The Telegraph reports that a scientist in Iran has registered something he calls "The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine." But before everyone gets super psyched about watching Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, the description of the device suggests it's been woefully misnamed.

The Telegraph talked to the 27-year-old serial inventor, who told them "the device worked by a set of complex algorithms to 'predict five to eight years of the future life of any individual, with 98 percent accuracy.'" He added:

North Korea's official Twitter account only follows three, and only three, other accounts. One belongs to Jimmy Dushku, a 25-year-old investor who's been to almost 60 Coldplay concerts and counts The Fast and the Furious as his favorite movie. What? [Mother Jones]

They're not saying how they know, exactly, but U.S. officials are convinced that the cyberattacks on the consumer-facing websites of American banks are the work of the Iranian government. [NYT]

Soon you will buy prepaid iPhones at Walmart. Sounds like another season of The Wire is in order. [PRNewswire]

Not to put a timetable on anything, but Digg figures its content discovery app  is about one percent done. Which is as fine a time as any to talk about monetization. [Digg]

This guy is everywhere now. (Image Devdsp on Flickr)

Analysis of the DDoS tools used in cyber attacks on American banks by religiously-motivated hackers Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters indicates a "well-funded" effort, according to security experts.

As reported by CSO Online, analysts at security firm Prolexic Technologies were able to identify the DDoS toolkit "itsoknoproblembro" as the software behind attacks against Bank of America, Chase Bank, Wells Fargo and PNC.

It may have a hilarious name, but "itsoknoproblembro" is serious business:

The "itsoknoproblembro" toolkit is capable of simultaneously attacking components of a website's infrastructure and application layers, flooding the targets with sustained traffic peaking at 70 gigabits per second. In addition, Prolexic found that traffic signatures were unusually complex and therefore difficult to reroute away from the targets.

The vendor, which declined to name the banks whose sites it tracked, said the attackers likely spent months probing the sites for the components most susceptible to a DDoS assault. They also were knowledgeable in the technology used to mitigate such attacks.

The CEO of Prolexic told CSO Online that these were "on the level of a Stuxnet type of attack."

Stuxnet was a remarkable cyberespionage tool, reportedly jointly created by the U.S. and Israel, that struck a major blow to Iran's nuclear program in 2010.

Even though Iran and the Cyber Fighters have denied being behind last week's bank attacks, Prolexic found that "several large networks" of botnets were utilized in the attacks, indicating an operation beyond the resources of most small groups of independent attackers.

Stuxnet, the first shot across the bow. (Krebs On Security)

Cyber attackers who went after Chase and Bank of America with Directed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the banks' websites may have been working for Iran.

A report from the Washington Post cites several officials who have made this claim, including Senator Joseph Lieberman, the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Post reports that in an interview with C-SPAN, Sen. Lieberman disputed the idea the attackers were independent hacktivists outraged by a controversial anti-Muslim film:

"I don’t believe these were just hackers who were skilled enough to cause disruption of the Web sites," said Lieberman in an interview taped for C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" program. "I think this was done by Iran and the Quds Force, which has its own developing cyberattack capability." The Quds Force is a special unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the military.

Lieberman said he believed the efforts were in response to "the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions."

The Post also reported that there have been similar attacks against American telecoms such as AT&T and Level 3.

What wasn't clear from Sen. Lieberman's remarks or the Post's report was whether the "Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam," who claimed credit for the attacks and dubbed them "Operation Ababil" were opportunistic trolls or misdirection by Iranian cyber forces.

If officials and cyber-security experts quoted by the Post are correct, it is likely Iran intended the bank attacks as a response to U.S. actions such as the infiltration of the Stuxnet worm, which disrupted Iranian nuclear operations in 2010. Stuxnet targeted uranium enrichment centrifuges and caused them to spin wildly out of control.

The most recent Pastebin post from the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam claimed the attack on Chase's web properties was step two. They seemed to imply there were several more steps to go.

THUNDA STRUCK!

Looks like the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz is, at the very least, 0 for 2 against cyber attacks. First came Stuxnet, which wreaked havoc with the equipment used to purify uranium. And now--at least, if a recent report (via VentureBeat) is true--they are dealing with a malware infestation involving sudden, late-night AC/DC.

F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hypponen received the following email from someone who claimed to be an Iranian nuclear scientist: 

I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom.

According to the email our cyber experts sent to our teams, they believe a hacker tool Metasploit was used. The hackers had access to our VPN. The automation network and Siemens hardware were attacked and shut down. I only know very little about these cyber issues as I am scientist not a computer expert.

There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC.

Hypponen was unable to confirm the story--but he was able to confirm the email came from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.

Memo to the American cyberweapons program: We're not saying this was you guys, but if it was, you might want to opt for a less obvious calling card in the future.

Let slip the dogs of cyber war. (flickr.com/anhonorablegerman)

Remember last summer, when all anyone could talk about was hacktivists? For a while there, we were living in a William Gibson novel, with hackers wreaking havoc and corporate types running scared. Well, so far, this June is shaping up a little differently, with a wave of state-sponsored attacks straight out of a spy novel.

Much as we love lone teenaged lone wolves typing away in their moms' basements, it's clear they're just the loudest and proudest of hackers. Just because the spies don't have official Twitter accounts and release YouTube videos doesn't mean they're not there, though. The latest two instances come courtesy of Fast Company, which points out that dissidents are increasingly a target of state-sponsored hacks.

For example: Tibetan activists recently received a phishing email, disguised as an official communique regarding a recent European resolution, which takes root in their computers and calls up a server in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, members of the Syrian opposition are being targeted with malware, distributed via Skype, that installs spying software.

Google has even started warning Gmail users when they've been targets of an attempted state-sponsored cyber attack.

This is different from just a couple of months ago, when Stuxnet and Flame looked conveniently aligned with the strategic goals of the U.S. and Israel, but mum was the word as to where the infections came from. Now, thanks to exposes in the New York Times and the Washington Post respectively, we've good as got confirmation they were programs developed by the two nations working in concert to slow Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Nor is the cyber tussle between the U.S. and Iran is over. Just today, an Iranian news agency (described by the AP as "semiofficial") claimed to have fought off another "massive" cyber attack. The expression "can of worms" comes to mind.

LulzSec, we have to say, was a lot more entertaining.

This new discovery is likely to fuel theories from security experts that Stuxnet was part of an American-led cyber program "that is still active in the Middle East and perhaps other parts of the world," says Reuters. Not the best way to win those hearts and minds!

Kaspersky Labs is the same firm that discovered Flame last month. CEO Eugene Kaspersky said portions of Flame's software code matched code from a 2009 version of Stuxnet. Stuxnet was discovered in 2010 after it hacked an Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, damaging centrifuges used to enrich uranium.  At a Reuters summit in London today, Mr. Kaspersky said,  "There were two different teams working in collaboration," on Stuxnet and Flame.

Authorities in Washington are busy distracting the public with investigations into the source of the leaks. But meanwhile, Israel is trying to get its name attached to the cyber attacks. This weekend, an article in Haaretz quoted anonymous Israeli agents insisting it was Mossad and not the U.S. that developed Stuxnet.

As Haaretz's Yossi Melman wrote:

"The Israeli officials actually told me a different version. They said that it was Israeli intelligence that began, a few years earlier, a cyberspace campaign to damage and slow down Iran’s nuclear intentions. And only later they managed to convince the USA to consider a joint operation — which, at the time, was unheard of. Even friendly nations are hesitant to share their technological and intelligence resources against a common enemy."

If the Mossad agents are willing to talk, we're sure John McCain would like a word.

Obama in the Situation Room. (flickr.com/anhonorablegerman)

Gather 'round, readers, it's Friday and that means it's time for a cyberwar spy thriller, courtesy of the New York Times. The paper of record has an excerpt of a new book that offers a thorough history of the top-secret origins of the Stuxnet worm, and it is a corker.

So: Stuxnet, rather than a lone experiment, is actually part of a larger program designed to put a stop to Iran's nuclear work. Dubbed "Olympic Games," work began under George W. Bush and continued under Barack Obama, in partnership with Israel. President Obama not only signed off on the program, but ramped it up. It wasn't supposed to escape Iran's nuclear facilities at Natanz, but escape it did, apparently as the result of some "programming error."

We've seen enough a) virus-infected laptops and b) zombie movies that we could've told the president that would happen.

In case you'd like some context:

“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data.

Also, for the love of God, people, adopt better security practices. Re: introducing the worm to Natanz: “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand.” And you'd better believe the U.S. isn't immune to these attacks, either:

Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using — and particularly to overusing — the weapon. In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

Quick, someone check on the electric grid.

Nineties Leftover, Tehran (Flickr.com/kamshots)

You guys, didn’t anyone tell Iran we’re not doing Internet April Fools Day anymore? Apparently not, because a fake interview with the country’s communications minister has everyone convinced they’re straight-up banning the internet.

An International Business Times piece is currently racing around the internet, giving everyone the impression that Iran is permanently pulling the plug sometime in August. From the article:

In a statement released Thursday, Reza Taghipour, the Iranian minister for Information and Communications Technology, announced the setting up of a national Intranet and the effective blockage of services like Google, Gmail, Google Plus, Yahoo and Hotmail, in line with Iran's plan for a "clean Internet.”

Now, IBT wasn’t exactly pulling this out of thin air, as Iran does have plans for some sort of closed "national information network," and they’ve already got a history of nationwide disruptions. But details are still scarce and the Iranian government now denies these reports, claiming the interview is fake, says the AFP:

The reports derived from a supposed interview with Communications Minister Reza Taghipour published on April 1 that was in fact a hoax, the ministry said in the statement on its own site www.ict.gov.ir -- which itself was not accessible outside of Iran.

The statement alleges the report serves "the propaganda wing of the West and providing its hostile media with a pretext emanating from a baseless claim."

Frankly, this leaves us with even more questions. Who's responsible for the hoax? Is Iran going to pull the plug once they do implement their national intranet? And whatever happened to faking out friends and family with a fictional engagement?