Iran threatens to disconnect from the Internet

In April, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of F-Secure, a Finnish computer security firm, received an unusual email. It came from a scientist working at the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran, and read:

“I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom.

“According to the email our cyber experts sent to our teams, they believe a hacker tool Metasploit was used. The hackers had access to our VPN. The automation network and Siemens hardware were attacked and shut down. I only know very little about these cyber issues as I am scientist not a computer expert.

“There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC.”

Hypponen was never able to confirm the claims. But the incident followed a spate of other attacks on Iranian infrastructure, like the Stuxnet “cyberweapon,” which infected systems at the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant in 2010 and crippled several thousand centrifuges in the process.

Now, it seems that the Iranians have had enough. In the past few weeks, Reza Taqipour, Iran’s minister of communication and information technology, called the global Internet “untrustworthy” and announced plans to disconnect key government ministries from the worldwide web by September.

“The regime no longer fears a physical attack from the West,” Mahmood Enayat, director of the Iran Media Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications, told the Wall Street Journal recently. “It still thinks the West wants to take over Iran, but through the Internet.”

Commandeering nuclear sites through the use of technology is one way to “take over” a country. However, certain websites seem to stoke the Iranian government’s fears just as much.

“We have identified and confronted 650 websites that have been set up to battle our regime — 39 of them are by opposition groups and our enemies, and the rest promote Western culture and worshiping Satan, and stoke sectarian divides,” conservative cleric Hamid Shahriari said in March. “We are worried about a portion of cyberspace that is used for exchanging information and conducting espionage.”

To that end, Iran’s Ministry of Communications and Technology has announced the launch of a domestic intranet — a completely closed loop that would leave Iranian citizens without online access to the rest of the world.

What would this mean for a country like Iran, which, according to Rafal Rohozinsky, a principal founder of the OpenNet Initiative, had the largest concentration of mainframe computers outside the U.S. in the 1970s, boasted a full IBM division in Tehran, and is more connected than anywhere else in the Middle East, save Israel? Can a nation simply flip a switch and disconnect itself from the web?