Iranian recklessness

In the interesting but currently somewhat discredited book on Russia entitled "Der kalte Freund" (The Cold Friend) from 2011, Alexander Rahr mentions the cyber attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in passing. He writes that this idea allegedly came from the then director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik - SWP), Volker Perthes. 

Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. In any case, it is astonishing how Iran repeatedly and recklessly disregards or apparently ignores elementary rules of infrastructural security. Since my sympathy for the Iranian government and its domestic and foreign policy activities is limited (i.e. equal to or less than zero), this doesn't bother me much. On the contrary: it should be an incentive to exploit these weaknesses. 

I took a closer look into a list, published by an Iranian agency, with 217 Iranian companies, most of which are relevant for military projects, but especially for nuclear installations and everything that goes with it. Most of these companies have some kind of connection with each other, and a number of them enjoy good relations with European companies.

Only a few are slightly outside the large network.

But the fact that fourteen of these 217 companies communicate via Yahoo and twenty via Gmail seems absurd to me! I'm probably not telling the Iranians a big secret, but anyone who acts so stupidly shouldn't be surprised if they are suddenly confronted with dubious USB sticks and malware.

And the fact that communication sometimes takes place through extreme bottlenecks is also reckless.

One can only hope that these and other, mostly technical and organisational  recklessnesses, which I will certainly not go into here, will become more frequent and that the whole war machine of Iran and its terrorist friends will collapse sooner rather than later!