The first neighbourhood they unplugged was Olaya, Riyadh’s wealthiest and gaudiest central district. By the time they had finished their rampage through the computer systems behind the power grid, the infiltrators believed they had left millions without electricity, crippling hospitals and military facilities.
What the hackers, whose use of Farsi and bespoke malware gave away their Iranian origins, did not realise was that the critical computer networks they had compromised were fake.
The network, complete with Arabic scripting and precise names of individual substations and pylons, was the work of MalCrawler, a cyber security group specialising in protecting industrial computer systems. It was just one of a set of intricate digital honeytraps designed to gauge the intentions of the attackers who routinely tried to crack into the systems owned by MalCrawler’s clients. Equally intricate models were made of European, American and Israeli power systems.
The evidence from the models aligned. The Chinese hungrily scooped up anything that looked like novel technical information. The Russians permeated deep into systems, mapping them and implanting hard-to-find backdoor access for potential future use. But neither dared do damage — unlike Iran.
Among the world’s big five cyber superpowers — the US, UK, Israel, Russia and China — MalCrawler concluded there was a digital equilibrium in military cyber offence based on assumptions over deterrence and reprisal.
“But in the Middle East, that’s not the case at all,” says Dewan Chowdhury, MalCrawler’s chief executive. “The mindset just seemed completely different — it wasn’t espionage or some kind of targeted operation necessarily, it was just to do as much damage as possible.”
The model MalCrawler designed to replicate the Israeli power grid was hit just as hard as the Saudi one. The hackers, again displaying tell-tale signs of Iranian origin, fatally compromised the safety systems of what they thought was one of Israel’s nuclear power stations.

Source: The Financial Times, 26 APRIL 2016