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National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases founder Morgan Wright said Thursday that there is “at least moderate confidence” that Iran is behind recent cybersecurity attacks on water facilities across Minnesota.
“You know, there was an alert that was put out four days before this describing that they believed Iran was going to launch an attack like this four days later and an attack is launched,” he said in an interview with Blake Burman on News Nation.
Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) said the attacks occurred Sunday and Monday and targeted “programmable logic controllers” (PLC) and “human-machine interfaces,” the agency said in an advisory Thursday.
The attacks followed a July 22 advisory from Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other federal agencies warned that Iranian hackers have been targeting PLC systems. It also emphasized operational technology owners and operators should “restrict direct internet access and ensure secure PLC deployment.”
John Israel, Minnesota’s chief information security officer, said the state provided information to federal agencies, which are “evaluating this activity in the broader national context.”
“They’re targeting one of the most vulnerable things in these plants now,” Wright continued, referring to how the attack targeted PLC systems in the water and wastewater facilities.
Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in the federal advisory Iranian actors “continue to target U.S. critical infrastructure” and “disrupt the essential services Americans rely on.”
Wright warned that in the conflict with Iran, the U.S. dominating on land and sea but that cyber space is one of the areas Iran “can punch at or above their weight at a near peer level with us.”
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