Stuxnet Two?

The New York Times is reporting that a cyberattack against Iran in June took out a database used by Iran’s paramilitary arm used to plot attacks against oil tankers. The attack also degraded Tehran’s ability to target shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, and Iran is still trying to recover information destroyed in the June 20 attack and get back online.

This attack came right around the time that Iran shot down a U.S. drone, a retaliatory attack for which the Trump Administration called off at the eleventh hour.

MIT Review reports the attack has had a lingering impact on the Iranian military’s ability to target oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, and noted the database wiped out belong to Iran’s paramilitary forces known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

U.S. officials said there has been no escalation from Iran, but the Times reports there have been doubts about whether the benefits of the operation outweighed the cost — “lost intelligence and lost access to a critical network used by the Guard.”

The entire episode is reminiscent of Stuxnet, a cyber operation thought to be developed by the U.S. and Israel that targeted and destroyed controller systems for centrifuges in Iran’s uranium enrichment program — only this time at a much faster pace.