This one just won't die. We've heard that hackers accessed a Springfield water plant. Then DHS/FBI concluded that the failure of a water pump in Springfield was not a cyberattack. Now, Hal Hodson is reporting for Information Age that the FBI has confirmed that hackers accessed SCADA systems controlling critical infrastructure in three cities.
Specifically, the article quotes Michael Welch, the deputy assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, as saying "We just had a circumstance where we had three cities, one of them a major city within the US, where you had several hackers that had made their way into SCADA systems within the city." Welch went on to say that the hackers "could theoretically have dumped sewage into a lake or shut off the power to a shopping mall."
Welch also said that the attack was essentially a tease to law enforcement, and an ego trip for the hackers.
It's unclear whether these three attacks were related to the water facility in Springfield, Illinois.
I don't know if this is big news or not. It's not like it's particularly hard to hack SCADA systems, and I'm sure that it's happened before (and we just don't know about it), and I'm absolutely positive it will happen again. However, if these attacks are real, I think that the first official reports that hackers have infiltrated our nation's critical infrastructure are significant. We'll see if more comes of this.
The rest of the article can be found here.
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