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Doesn't matter. Cyber Command has a contingency plan, called Nitro Zeus, using cyber and other methods, to shut down the entire country of Iran. It's a full-scale attack in waiting. When Nakasone and Cyber Command looked at what their digital weapons could contribute to the battle plan, they focused on the Iranian targets that they could reach by boring into the country's networks: Iran's air defense, its communications systems, and its power grid. Nitro Zeus would be the opening act of the war plan: turning off an entire country so fast that retaliation would have been extremely difficult. It was also, in the minds of some of its creators, a glimpse of the future. The idea was to plunge the target country into blackness and confusion from the very beginning of a conflict. That would give Israel and the United States time to bomb the many suspected nuclear sites, take pictures of how much damage was done, and if necessary bomb them again. But the hope was that Nitro Zeus would avert an all-out war, because the Iranians would, in theory, not be able to strike back. As part of the plan, Iran's missile capability would also have been targeted. So, even as President Obama was worried about the vulnerability of America's electric grid, the United States was tunneling inside Iran's grid - along with its cell-phone network and even the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' command-and-control systems. "This was pretty mind blowing to me," one former official said. "Here we were, going to work every day behind sealed doors, essentially trying to figure out if it was possible to cripple an entire nation's infrastructure without ever firing a shot or dropping a bomb. So we littered Iran's networks with malware," he said, a reference to the process of placing implants in key strategic systems that could, later on, be used to inject destructive code or simply turn the networks off. "The hard part was keeping track of all of it," he said. Keeping track was tricky business because networks always change - and because there was no way to test Iran's vulnerabilities in field conditions. So Nakasone and the thousands of people at work on Nitro Zeus resorted to tabletop exercises, simulations of an attack. They tested and retested on a virtual model of Iran's networks to make sure that the implants were not visible to the Iranians and that collateral damage was limited. And they created answers from scratch to a series of questions: How do you take down the grid and keep it down? How about the air defenses? If the Iranians try to retaliate, how do you make sure they never get off the ground? "This was an enormous, and enormously complex, program," the former official said. "Before it was developed, the US had never assembled a combined cyber and kinetic attack plan on this scale." Source: David E. Sanger, "The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age", Crown, NY, 2018, pp.39-44 |
You may want to read articles by this guy for an alternative view on Iran's capabilities.
https://oilprice.com/contributors/Yossef-Bodansky
as a sidenote, some people even believed the US claims that their air defence systems are the best in the world, until a few days ago.