Document Reveals Growth of Cyberwarfare Between the US and Iran

A newly disclosed National Security Agency document illustrates the striking acceleration of the use of cyberweapons by the United States and Iran against each other, both for spying and sabotage, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart met in Geneva to try to break a stalemate in the talks over Iran’s disputed nuclear program.

The document, which was written in April 2013 for Gen. Keith B. Alexander, then the director of the National Security Agency, described how Iranian officials had discovered new evidence the year before that the United States was preparing computer surveillance or cyberattacks on their networks. It detailed how the United States and Britain had worked together to contain the damage from “Iran’s discovery of computer network exploitation tools” -- the building blocks of cyberweapons. That was more than two years after the Stuxnet worm attack by the United States and Israel severely damaged the computer networks at Tehran’s nuclear enrichment plant. The document acknowledged that its attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a George W. Bush administration program, kicked off the cycle of retaliation and escalation that has come to mark the computer competition between the United States and Iran.