US Navy Says Planning Drone Boat Force In Middle East Waters
The US Navy's 5th Fleet has announced the launch of a joint force of drone boats with allies to patrol Mideast's volatile waters as tensions simmer with Iran.
The US Navy's 5th Fleet has announced the launch of a joint force of drone boats with allies to patrol Mideast's volatile waters as tensions simmer with Iran.
Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, who leads the 5th Fleet, told The Associated Press that 100 unmanned drones, both sailing and submersible, would dramatically multiply the surveillance capacities of the US Navy, allowing it to keep a close eye on waters critical to the flow of the global oil and shipping.
Trade at sea has been targeted in recent years as Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers collapsed.
"By using unmanned systems, we can just simply see more. They're high-reliability and remove the human factor," Cooper said on the sidelines of a defense exhibition in Abu Dhabi, adding the systems are "the only way to cover on whatever gaps that we have today."
Cooper said he hopes the drone force would be operational by the summer of 2023 to put more "eyes and ears on the water."
The Bahrain-based 5th Fleet includes the crucial Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of all oil passes.
It also stretches as far as the Red Sea reaches near the Suez Canal, the waterway in Egypt linking the Mideast to the Mediterranean, and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait off Yemen.
The high seas have witnessed a series of assaults and escalations in recent years, following former President Donald Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the nuclear deal and reimpose devastating sanctions on Iran.
A maritime shadow war has played out as oil tankers have been seized by Iranian forces and suspicious explosions have struck vessels in the region, including those linked to Israeli and Western firms.
Iran has denied involvement in the attacks, despite evidence from the West to the contrary.
"It's been well-established that Iran is the is the number one and the primary regional threat we are addressing," Cooper said.
Iran sponsors proxy militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen that give it a military reach across the region.
As Yemen's 7-year-old civil war grinds on, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels have dispatched bomb-laden drone boats toward Saudi waters that have damaged vessels and oil facilities.
There have also been a recent string of tense encounters between Iranian and American naval boats in the Mideast waters.
The confrontations have underscored the risk of an armed clash between the nations.
Notably, however, Cooper said the US has not seen such an episode in the past few months, as diplomats in Vienna attempt to resuscitate the tattered atomic accord.
"If you look back over the last couple of months, I would say it's status quo," Cooper said.
"There have been some periods where they have had an uptick in activity... we certainly call that out, but lately it's been status quo," he added.
Iran's mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The shared threat of Iran has prompted a rapid realignment of politics in the Middle East.
In 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized ties with Israel in a series of US-brokered accords.
Those warm relations have even extended into a form of military diplomacy.
Israel for the first time joined in a massive US-led naval exercise in the region earlier this month, publicly participating alongside other Gulf Arab states with which it has no relations, including Saudi Arabia.
Cooper said that Israel likely would join in the Navy's unmanned naval drone task force in the region.
"I would expect exercises in the future where we would work side by side," he said.
AP report
The American-Israeli software and hardware security company said in a comprehensive technical analysis published on February18 that the recent wave of attacks that caused major disruptions to public services are far from minor website defacements.
The report provided in-depth breakdowns for some of the attacks, including the targeted hack of the state broadcaster (IRIB) in late January, saying the attackers’ aim was also to disrupt the IRIB’s programs, with the damage to the TV and radio networks possibly more serious than officially reported.
Several television and radio channels of the state broadcaster were hacked on January 27 with photos of leaders of an opposition group briefly aired. The image of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, leaders of the Albania-based opposition Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), were broadcast for around 10 seconds with audio footage from one of their speeches in the background.
After the picture of the MEK leaders, the video showed a photo of Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei with a red cross on it, as an off-camera voice said, “Death to Khamenei.” Khamenei was badly injured in 1981 in one of a series of bombings attributed to the MEK.
Check Point research team probed the cyberattack and was able to retrieve the files and forensic evidence from publicly available resources, finding malicious executables whose purpose was to air the protest message, as well as evidence that a wiper malware was used.
The security firm provided a technical analysis of the tools used in the attack, as well as the attackers’ tactics, identifying malware that takes screenshots of the victims’ screens, several custom-made backdoors, and related batch scripts and configuration files used to install and configure the malicious executables.
Check Point also gave a detailed report about other major cyber-attacks such as an attack that hit the Iranian national railway and cargo services in July 2021. The attack caused “unprecedented disruptions” to the country’s trains, a day before media outlets reported that the website of Iran’s Roads Ministry, in charge of transportation, was taken down in a ‘cyber disruption’, preventing access to their official portal and sub-services.
A message was also displayed on the train schedule boards referred perplexed passengers to the Supreme Leader’s office phone number.
A group called ‘Predatory Sparrow’ claimed responsibility for the attacks, whose tools and tactics were used in similar operations against private companies in Syria by an anti-regime group called Indra.
In August 2021, the hacktivist group Tapandegan (Palpitations), previously known for hacking and displaying protest messages on the electronic flight arrival and departure boards in Mashhad and Tabriz international airports in 2018, released security camera footage from Tehran's Evin Prison, where many political prisoners are held. Tapandegan said the images had been acquired by hackers called Edalat-e Ali (Ali's Justice) and were being circulated to draw attention to human rights violations, particularly against political prisoners.
In October 2021, all gas stations in Iran were paralyzed by an attack that disrupted the electronic payment process, leading to extremely long queues for two days that prevented customers from paying with the government-issued electronic cards used to purchase subsidized fuel. When the card was swiped for payment, the supreme leader’s office phone number appeared on the screen. Iranian officials claimed that foreign actors, such as Israel and the US, were behind the attack. However, Predatory Sparrow claimed responsibility for this attack as well.
On February 1, the web-based streaming platform of IRIB, Telewebion, was hijacked yet again to broadcast protest messages urging citizens to rebel and stating that “the regime’s foundations are rattling” in the middle of a live broadcast of the Iran-UAE soccer match.
Recently, on February 7, 2022, the Edalat-e Ali group released footage from closed-circuit cameras in another Iranian prison, Ghezel Hesar.
Check Point says it is still not clear how the attackers gained initial access to these networks that are “completely isolated, are equipped with acceptable security protocols and are not accessible via the Internet”.
It concluded that “the actor may have many capabilities that have yet to be explored. On the one hand, the attackers managed to pull off a complicated operation to bypass security systems and network segmentation, penetrate the broadcaster’s networks, produce and run the malicious tools that heavily rely on internal knowledge of the broadcasting software used by victims, all while staying under the radar during the reconnaissance and initial intrusion stages”.
Check Point also concluded that “the attackers’ tools are of relatively low quality and sophistication and are launched by clumsy and sometimes buggy 3-line batch scripts”, which supports their “theory that the attackers might have had help from insiders or indicate a yet unknown collaboration between different groups with different skills”.
The crash happened in a residential area in the center of Tabriz, a city of 1.6 million residents. The third person killed was a passerby in the area.
The accident was followed by a huge fire in central Tabriz, which was put out following the intervention of the firefighters.
According to the commander of the Tabriz air base, General Reza Yousefi, the jet had been used for training while it suffered a technical problem on its final flight. He said that due to the technical problem “pilots could not reach the runway”.
Yousefi claimed that the pilots could have used the ejection system, but they refused to do it and “sacrificed themselves” to guide the jet to the stadium and not crash into a populated area “to keep people safe”.
The jet, however, initially hit the ground of a school according to local reports before crashing into the stadium but the school was closed, and no one was injured or killed there.
Iran’s air force has an assortment of US-made military aircraft purchased before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which are not considered in optimal condition as decades of Western sanctions have made it hard to maintain the aging fleet.