There’s a new target in 21st century warfare: US tech companies.
According to Al Jazeera, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps made the announcement following attacks on the country by US and Israeli military forces. In retaliation to a specific strike on an Iranian bank — which reportedly killed several civilian employees — Iranian military officials declared that they would now count US- and Israeli-linked financial and tech institutions among their targets.
“As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands,” Iran’s Tasnim News Agency announced, according to Al Jazeera.
In a document viewed by Al Jazeera, the IRGC listed a number of US tech companies as “Iran’s new targets,” including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, as well as a cloud computing companies in Israel and several Gulf countries.
“The Americans should await our countermeasure and our painful response,” a spokesperson for the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, the IRGC’s unified combatant command declared.
The decision to declare open season on tech offices is extreme, to be sure, but it’s not exactly irrational from a military point of view. Big tech companies have become a core component of the US military apparatus, providing surveillance platforms, AI targeting capabilities, and network infrastructure — to say nothing of the Pentagon’s extensive collection of lethal connected hardware.
A sign that Iran’s not bluffing: the announcement comes after its drones inflicted “structural damage” on three Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Those strikes are believed to be the first instance of an adversary targeting US corporate tech facilities in an attack — a sign of the strange new battlefield as commercial tech infrastructure is now visibly embedded throughout the US military apparatus.
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