Did the NSA and the UKs Spy Agency Launch a Joint Cyberattack on Iran?

An NSA document newly published today suggests two interesting facts that havent previously been reported.

The Intercept, which published the document, highlighted that in it the NSA expresses fear that it may be teaching Iran how to hack, but there are two other points in the document that merit attention.

One concerns the spy tool known as Flame; the other refers to concerns the NSA had about partnering with the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters and Israeli intelligence in surveillance operations.

In the document, prepared in April 2013 for a meeting between the NSA director and GCHQ, the author cites the Flame attack against Iran as an example of a US/GCHQ partnership. Flame was a massive spy platform exposed by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec in 2012. Flame targeted more than 10,000 machines in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, the Israeli Occupied Territories and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa and was active for at least six years before it was discovered. It used some of the same code that Stuxnet used, leading researchers to conclude that it had been created by the same US/Israel teams that had created Stuxnet. The Washington Post reported in 2012 that the US and Israel were both behind Flame, quoting anonymous US officials. But the new Snowden document hints that GCHQ might have been involved in Flame with the US.

Although the document doesnt say overtly that GCHQ partnered with the US in creating and unleashing Flame, it hints obliquely at cooperation. The document notes that the NSA has successfully worked multiple high-priority surges with GCHQ and cites Flame as an example. But, oddly, it doesnt say they worked together on creating Flame. Instead, it simply cites Irans discovery of Flame in a list of projects on which the GCHQ and the US collaborated.

These jointly worked events include the storming of the British Embassy in Tehran; Irans discovery of computer network exploitation tools on their networks in 2012 and 2013; and support to policymakers during the multiple rounds of P5 plus 1 negotiation on Irans nuclear program, the document reads. The reference to an embassy attack presumably refers to the 2011 attack on the British embassy by protestors in Iran. The reference to the P5 plus 1 relates to negotiations between Iran and Western powers over Irans nuclear program. The network attacks are identified by name as the Flame attacks in another part of the document.

Its unclear what else this might refer to if not the two countries partnering in the creation and unleashing of Flame. Other documents leaked by Edward Snowden have spelled out in more detail how the NSA and GCHQ have partnered over the years in other spy operations, ranging from sharing data siphoned from undersea cables to the hacking of telecom networks, like Belgiums Belgacom, to monitor mobile traffic. The new document suggests that the two countries might also have partnered on Flame in some way, though its unclear to what extent. If this is correct, and the previous Post is correct as well, it would mean the three nations teamed up to spy on Iran, presumably over its nuclear program.

Although there are numerous examples released in the Snowden documents of NSA-GCHQ cooperation as well as NSA-Israeli cooperation, the 2013 document published today expresses concern about a trilateral agreement between the three nations.

It appears in a section discussing a collaboration between the NSA, GCHQ and ISNUa reference to the Israeli SIGINT National Unit, the Israeli counterpart to the NSA. Under the heading Potential Landmines, the document notes that GCHQ has long pushed to work with the NSA and ISNU in a trilateral arrangement to prosecute the Iranian target. And it notes that the NSA and GCHQ have agreed to share information gleaned from their separate partnerships with Israeli intelligence. But with regard to a trilateral partnership, the NSA had reservations. The document notes that the SID policy has been opposed to such a blanket arrangement.

SID refers to the Signals Intelligence Directorate. Under the SID Management Directive 422 (.pdf), the intelligence community is prohibited from delegating a mission to a non-USSS elementthat is, a non-US SIGINT Systemwithout first obtaining a memo of understanding between the NSA and the non-US entity. NSA activities are government by a number of directives, most important among them is USSID 18, which governs what the US can and cannot collect on US persons and how it must handle information collected incidentally on them. Including a foreign spy agency in data collection raises issues about oversight and legality if it involves data pertaining to U.S. persons. This may be in part why the NSA was concerned.

Continue reading here:
Did the NSA and the UKs Spy Agency Launch a Joint Cyberattack on Iran?