Iran warns US and UK cyber attacks will result in retaliation

Iran has been flexing its muscles on the world stage again, warning the US and its allies that any cyber attack against the country will result in retaliation from Tehran.

Muslim news organisation the Ahlul Bayt News Agency reported Brigadier General Ali Shadmani, head of the Operations Department of the Iranian Armed Forces, as saying that any cyber attack on Iran would be "risky" and met with swift reprisals.

Shadmani is reported as saying that Western allies have been trying to destabilise Iran for decades, backing "anti-revolutionary terrorist organisations" such as MKO.

A strange one this. Of course there are acts of cyber espionage and nation state-related attacks occurring all the time, so Shadmani perhaps took this opportunity to remind the West that he knows what the US and its allies are up to.

Or perhaps it was another reference to the infamous Stuxnet worm which is widely believed to have been engineered with the help of states such as Israel with the express aim of disrupting Iran's nuclear programme.

Iran itself, of course, has been implicated in several cyber attacks, most recently in the Comodo and DigiNotar breaches which yielded a treasure trove of fake SSL certificates which could have been used to build phishing sites.