January 9, 2012: Israeli intelligence officials have revealed that they believe Iran has, in the last few years, spent over a billion dollars to upgrade their Cyber War capabilities. This money has bought special hardware and software (most of it smuggled in illegally) as well as training many trusted Iranians to use all of it. Iran has a large community of expert Internet users, but most of them dislike the government and cannot be trusted to handle Iranian Cyber War activities. Despite that, the Iranians have gathered together enough competent people to create a more formidable Cyber War capability. This has proved useful to thwart enemy intelligence gathering.
Much of this Cyber War capability is used against reform minded Iranians, when it isn't being used to track down and identify foreign spies in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. The Iranian government fears that the West will eventually attack, and that Western intelligence operations inside Iran seek to find out where Iranian weapons and leaders are, and details of Iranian physical and Internet based defenses.
The Iranian effort was apparently aided by CIA operations that had gotten sloppy after years of ineffective Iranian counter-intelligence work. Moreover, while most educated Iranians oppose the religious dictatorship ruling their country, there are a sufficient number of educated Iranians supporting the ruling clerics to provide the kind of personnel to run a high-tech operation like this. Many educated Iranians are very patriotic, or willing to support their corrupt dictatorship in return for a comfortable life.
