Sitting in a brightly lit apartment in Brooklyn, an American hacker who asked Al-Monitor to call him Alex scribbled down a dizzying array of cyberstrikes between the United States/Israel and Iran since 2010. The page was fast being covered in Alex’s rushed handwriting, and his eyes glimmered with excitement.
“They’ve gotten incredibly sophisticated,” he said as he marveled at the speed at which Iranian hackers have been able to create a defensive and offensive arm against Western cyberattacks. Yet, as he neared 2015 on his ad hoc timeline, his pen began to slow.