Posted on 12/21/2015 12:56:09 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Iranian hackers infiltrated the control system of a small dam less than 20 miles from New York City two years ago, sparking concerns that reached to the White House, according to former and current U.S. officials and experts familiar with the previously undisclosed incident.
The breach came amid attacks by hackers linked to Iran's government against the websites of U.S. banks, and just a few years after American spies had damaged an Iranian nuclear facility with a sophisticated computer worm called Stuxnet. In October 2012, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called out Iran's hacking, prompting fears of cyberwar.
The still-classified dam intrusion illustrates a top concern for U.S. officials as they enter an age of digital state-on-state conflict. America's power grid, factories, pipelines, bridges and dams--all prime targets for digital armies--are sitting largely unprotected on the Internet. And, unlike in a traditional war, it is sometimes difficult to know whether or where an opponent has struck. In the case of the dam hack, federal investigators initially thought the target might have been a much larger dam in Oregon.
Many of the computers controlling industrial systems are old and predate the consumer Internet. In the early digital days, this was touted as a security advantage. But companies, against the advice of hacking gurus, increasingly brought them online in the past decade as a way to add "smarts" to U.S. infrastructure. Often, they are connected directly to office computer networks, which are notoriously easy to breach.
These systems control the flow in pipelines, the movements of drawbridges and water releases from dams. A hacker could theoretically cause an explosion, a flood or a traffic jam.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
I believe there was a case somewhere where they actually dumped some kind of chemical poison into a reservoir, but tests on the water couldn’t measure the level of contamination.
It would take hundreds of dump-trucks full of pure sodium cyanide to cause any mass effects on a big city like New York, even if terrorists could figure out a way to dump it all into one of the big NYC reservoirs, mix it thoroughly, etc.
Also, I believe that NYC tests for poisons and biological agents on a continuous basis. I don’t know about other cities.
A contact of mine who does cybersecurity says there’s scuttlebutt going around that Obama was actually blackmailed by Iran on the nuke deal with these demonstrations, followed by threats to shut down our entire electrical grid.
I ran a small public water supply company for 30 years. Several years ago there was a meeting of all the local, Cleveland/Akron/etc., operators concerning terrorism. It was decided that the big systems were not at much risk simply because of volume. Akron has several big reservoirs, Cleveland has Lake Erie. Small systems were much more at risk.
Dilution is the Solution to Pollution, as I’m sure you’ve heard.
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