Iranian hackers breached the control system of a small dam near New York City in 2013, worrying federal officials about the security of the nation's infrastructure,
The Wall Street Journal reports.
The intrusion took place at the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye, N.Y., a flood control facility about 5 miles from Long Island Sound — and the hackers got into the system through a cellular modem, the Journal reports, citing former and current U.S.
"The 2013 dam hack highlighted another challenge for America's digital defenses: the fog of cyber war," the Journal reports, adding U.S. officials at first weren't able to determine where the hackers had infiltrated, thinking it had been an incident in Oregon.
"It's very, very small," Rye's city manager Marcus Serrano tells the Journal, adding FBI agents came around two years ago to ask the city's information-technology manager about a hacking incident.
The breach came as hackers linked to the Iranian government were attacking U.S. bank websites after American spies damaged an Iranian nuclear facility with the Stuxnet computer worm.
But the Journal reports the hack raised concerns about the more than 57,000 industrial control systems — more than any other country — that are largely unprotected on the Internet.
According to researchers at Shodan, a search engine that catalogs each machine online, the systems range from office air-conditioning units to major pipelines and electrical-control systems.
"Everything is being integrated, which is great, but it's not very secure," Cesar Cerrudo, an Argentine researcher and chief technology officer at IOActive Labs, a security-consulting firm, tells the Journal.
Operators of these systems "don't think about security."
According to the Journal, the Department of Homeland Security, for the 12 months ending Sept. 30, had received and responded to reports of 295 industrial-system hacking incidents. That's up from 245 from the prior fiscal year, the Journal reports.
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