Safe City

Safe City

Defensive and preventive patterns of the Islamic Republic of Iran against cyber-attacks emphasizing on the Stuxnet attack

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Gholamreza Jalali 1
Aramesh Shahbazi 2
Mehran Jaberi 3
1 Associate Professor, National Defense University, Tehran, Iran
2 Assistant Professor, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran
3 PhD student in Information Technology Management, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran
10.22034/ispdrc.2021.696750
Abstract
It was thought for many years that the use of nuclear weapons was the biggest threat against the
contemporary world. Concerning governments’ resorting to cyberspace to advance their short-term and
long-term goals, some consider the most serious current threat to be the governments’ abuse of the
widespread and flexible concept of cyberspace in order to achieve their goals. However, it seems that the
most serious threat of the contemporary world, in practice, is realized when both factors are combined. In
this situation, it is possible to organize a cyber war against the nuclear facilities and bases of the victim
states, and this combined scenario causes the aggravation of the previous risk factors and multiplies the
severity of the risk. Although, due to the lack of realization of the threshold of war in most of the cases,
there is no hope for the rule of international humanitarian law, this article intends to analyze how the
interests and rights of the victim government can be achieved in such cases by explaining one of the most
serious and obvious examples in this field, the Stuxnet virus case. For this, along with the conceptology of
such measures, we will address the international laws governing the situation described above and examine
the possibility of legitimate defense and reciprocity of the victim, especially considering the passage of
time
Keywords
Stuxnet
Iran
The U.S.A
cyber war
nuclear facilities
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