Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- In this war initiated by USA and Israel, it isn't Iran who's attacking civil targets.by neves
- They always point to a state actor to skirt liability for their own shitty IT work. Then the dim evil journalists swallow it whole, later regurgitating it for their eager little baby bird subscribers.
If there were actual penalties for rawdogging a PLC (or any other control system) on the internet, shit like this wouldn’t happen.
by krautburglar - >state and local officials throughout the country were on high alert for potential problems in vulnerable computers that are commonly used to monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels and water pressure.
You don't need a full bidirectional internet connection for remote monitoring, and data diodes are a relatively cheap way to monitor them in complete safety.
Completely stopping ingress of control (using above mentioned data diodes) is relatively easy, and should be legislated into being the norm.
by mikewarot - Why are water systems still on the internet? They should be completely cut off. If necessary, remote access must be from dedicated devices only, only to a mirrored view, and never for remote control.by OutOfHere
- People use 1000x more water than they need to drink.
If a water supply chain attack happened, we would just distribute bottled water for drinking, and people would go without washing for a few days whilst the issue was sorted.
Bottled water production is already big enough that delivering a bottle a day per person in new York is within the scale of the current production and retail networks scope.
It wouldn't cause the mass casualties an enemy might assume.
- Wasn't there a Defcon or Derby talk about this years back? (The insecurity, not the Persian angle)
Struggling for a source.
Guy had the energy of that one Simcity 2000 character who bugs out if you cut back on funding that you'll regret it. Early twenty aughts IIRC?
by firefax - The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are issuing this Public Service Announcement (PSA) to warn critical infrastructure asset owners and operators that malicious cyber actors (MCAs) are conducting cyber attacks targeting Operational Technology (OT) devices, including Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series. Since 27 July 2026, Water and Wastewater Sector (WWS) utility companies in at least seven states have reported incidents to the FBI, and some of that activity degraded water operations. While the FBI has only observed this behavior with the referenced Rockwell PLCs, similar considerations should also be made with other branded PLCs.
After remotely accessing internet-facing devices, the actors changed the IP addresses and passwords, resulting in a loss of monitoring and control functionality. To reduce the risk of compromise, the FBI and EPA recommend removing PLCs from direct internet exposure via secure gateway and firewalls, setting up strong, unique passwords, and utilizing an access control list (ACL) to allow only authorized communication between expected control system devices.
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2026/malicious-...
by lysace