Obama Normalized Relations With Iran AFTER Arresting Iranian State Supported Hackers Who Tried to Hack American Dam

Explain this to me. The United States announced today that it has indicted 7 Iranian men who hacked into our banks are tried to take control of an American dam. They described the attacks as ‘relentless’, ‘systematic’ and ‘widespread.’

In another era, an attack of this magnitude and maliciousness would be equivilant to a declaration of war. A foreign government hired operatives to blow up an American dam and steal money from U.S. banks and this isn’t news?

The worst part of this story isn’t the fact that we’re still ‘friends’ with Iran, giving them $150 billion and removing sanctions from the well known insidious regime. The worst part, the unforgivable part, is the fact that the Obama administration purposely kept this quiet so that it would not deter the nuclear deal, allowing Iran to have access to $150 billion, seeing the sanctions removed, and normalizing relations with the U.S. and Europe.

So whose government are our government really working for?

Seven Iranian hackers conducted a coordinated cyber attack on dozens of U.S. banks, causing millions of dollars in lost business, and tried to shut down a New York dam, the U.S. government said on Thursday in an indictment that for the first time accused individuals tied to another country of trying to disrupt critical infrastructure.

It said the seven accused were believed to have been working on behalf of Iran’s government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Those named live in Iran and the Iranian government is not expected to extradite them. There was no immediate comment from Tehran.
At least 46 major financial institutions and financial sector companies were targeted, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and American Express, the indictment said. AT&T also was targeted.

The hackers are accused of hitting the banks with distributed-denial-of-service attacks on a near-weekly basis, a relatively unsophisticated way of knocking computer networks offline by overwhelming them with a flood of spammed traffic.

“These attacks were relentless, they were systematic, and they were widespread,” U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told a Washington news conference.
The indictment from a federal grand jury in New York City said the attacks occurred from 2011 to 2013. Washington has previously accused military officers from China and the North Korean government of cyber attacks against U.S. businesses.

The attack on the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye Brook, New York, was especially alarming, Lynch said, because it represented a known intrusion on critical infrastructure. A stroke of good fortune prevented the hackers from obtaining operational control of the flood gates because the dam had been manually disconnected for routine maintenance, she said.

The Bowman hack was a “game-changing event” for the U.S. government that prompted investigators to uncover other systems vulnerable to similar attacks, said Andre McGregor, a former FBI agent and a lead case investigator on the dam intrusion.

“The investigation’s discovery of many more exposed computer systems with vulnerable management consoles is a constant reminder that basic cyber hygiene remains at the forefront of the battle against cyber attacks,” said McGregor, now director of security at Tanium, a Silicon Valley cyber security firm.
“We must step up our counter-hacking game ASAP to deal with threats from places like Iran and would be terrorists,” said New York Senator Chuck Schumer in a statement.

The defendants were identified as Ahmad Fathi, Hamid Firoozi, Amin Shokohi, Sadegh Ahmadzadegan, Omid Ghaffarinia, Sina Keissar and Nader Seidi, all citizens and residents of Iran. They are accused of conspiracy to commit computer hacking while employed by two Iran-based computer companies, ITSecTeam and Mersad Company.
Firoozi also is charged with obtaining and abetting unauthorized access to a protected computer.

“An important part of our cyber security practice is to identify the actors and to attribute them publicly when we can,” Lynch said Thursday. “We do this so that they know they cannot hide.”

U.S. officials largely completed the investigation more than a year ago, according to two sources familiar with the matter, but held off releasing the indictment so as to not jeopardize the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran or a January prisoner swap.