In the teensy Midwestern town of Braham, homemade pie capital of Minnesota, something unusual in the municipality’s computer systems knocked the city’s entire water supply offline last week.
Within a few hours, dozens of other Minnesota cities discovered that their water and wastewater utilities, too, had been compromised, most likely as part of a massive Iranian cyberattack, the kind that US officials have been warning about since the war began.
At least a dozen states have been affected by the attack, which briefly led to a flurry of small-town service disruptions, boil-water notices, and local flooding. Water wells, dams, sewers, and pipelines are some of America’s oldest and creakiest pieces of infrastructure, built long before the internet existed, and certainly long before AI made hacking much easier. While you may assume most hackers are in it for the money or for data, some have targeted critical infrastructure like water systems or energy grids in ploys for control or disruption — or worse still, as acts of war.
And, as last week’s attacks show, the nation’s water system is woefully unprepared. But how worried should you be that the very infrastructure that keeps our water taps running is, apparently, hackable?
Quite worried, indeed.
When we say the water supply got hacked, what we really mean is that someone, somewhere has broken into the computer that controls a local water treatment plant or reservoir, and is now pulling the levers, like the one that decides how much of a corrosive chemical can safely go into cleaning the water that comes out of your tap.
The good news is, none of this happened last week. Nobody died, nobody lost water for more than a few hours, no fire hydrants ran dry, and no hospitals were forced to cut off their dialysis machines (which can use more than a hundred gallons of water per treatment session). There’s no need to panic, and your drinking water is almost certainly still safe to drink, assuming it was safe before. Even the city of Braham, within a few hours, was able to bring its water tower back online, pumping groundwater back to its 1,800 residents.
NJ water cyberattack blamed on Iran
Two municipal water systems in New Jersey were targeted in cyberattacks in the last week, widely thought to be the work of Iran, the state said Wednesday.
The affected utilities, which were not named, were temporarily blinded when automated systems went down. Both utilities shifted to manual operations and the state said there was no disruption to service and both systems have been “secured with strengthened access controls.”
“Our New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell (NJCCIC) responded to two cyber incidents affecting New Jersey municipal water systems this past week. The NJCCIC is working directly with the affected utilities alongside our federal partners at the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” the state said Wednesday.
https://abcnews.com/US/2-new-jersey-municipal-water-systems-targeted-cyberattacks/story?id=135383816