On July 29 the South Asia Center’s Iran Task Force and the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security‘s Cyber Statecraft Initiative will launch an issue brief entitled, “Iran: How a Third Tier Cyber Power Can Still Threaten the United States” by Barbara Slavin and Jason Healey, and host a public briefing on past and possible future cyber skirmishes between the countries.

Monday, July 29, 2013

9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Cosmos Club Powell Room
2121 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20008

RSVP HERE

On Twitter? Follow @ACSouthAsia for live tweeting and use #IranTaskForce to take part in the discussion.

While hopes for a diminution of US-Iran differences have risen since the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next president, neither Iran nor the United States are likely to stop efforts to probe for weaknesses in each other’s cyber defenses and to investigate offensive options. The United States, and Israel, are believed responsible for the Stuxnet virus that destroyed 1,000 Iranian centrifuges in 2010, and Iran is alleged to have responded last year with attacks on US financial institutions. Panelists will discuss Iran’s capacity to mount damaging cyber attacks on US and allied targets and appropriate US strategy going forward.

A discussion with

Barbara Slavin
Senior Fellow, South Asia Center
Atlantic Council

Jason Healey
Director, Cyber Statecraft Initiative
Atlantic Council

Dmitri Alperovitch
Senior Fellow, Cyber Statecraft Initiative
Atlantic Council

Barbara Slavin is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center and Washington correspondent for Al-Monitor.com, a website devoted to news from and about the Middle East. The author of a 2007 book, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the US and the Twisted Path to Confrontation, she is a regular commentator on US foreign policy and Iran on NPR, PBS, and C-SPAN. A career journalist, Slavin previously served as assistant managing editor for world and national security of The Washington Times, senior diplomatic reporter for USA TODAY, Cairo correspondent for The Economist, and as an editor at The New York Times Week in Review.

Jason Healey is the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, working to demystify the overlap of traditional national security and cyberspace by focusing on international cooperation, completion, and conflict in cyberspace. He has worked on cyber issues since the 1990s as a policy director at the White House, as executive director at Goldman Sachs Asia, and as a US Air Force intelligence officer. As a widely published expert on cyber conflict and statecraft, he is a board member of Cyber Conflict Studies Association and lecturer in cyber policy at Georgetown University. His was editor of A Fierce Domain: Conflict in Cyberspace, 1986-2012, the first comprehensive cyber conflict history, and co-authored the Cyber Security Policy Guidebook (2012, Wiley) and dozens of opinion pieces and issue briefs.

Dmitri Alperovitch is a senior fellow with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. With more than a decade of experience in the field of information security, Alperovitch is a leading inventor of numerous patent-pending technologies and has conducted extensive research on reputation systems, spam detection, public-key and identity-based cryptography, and network intrusion detection and prevention. As a recognized authority on online organized criminal activity, cyber warfare, and cybersecurity, Alperovitch has significant experience working as a subject matter expert with all levels of US and international law enforcement on analysis, investigations, and profiling of transnational organized criminal activities and cyberthreats from terrorist and nation-state adversaries. Alperovitch holds a master’s degree in information securi ty and a bachelor’s degree in computer science, both from Georgia Institute of Technology.