U.S. Sees Iran as Likely Behind Cyberattack on Minnesota Water Systems
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Nate George, the mayor of Braham, Minn., a small city 65 miles north of Minneapolis, said public works personnel noted early Monday that the well that feeds the city’s water tower was malfunctioning.
> “Public works isolated the affected system, restored a backup and restarted the plant within approximately 90 minutes,” Mr. George said in a statement. The city briefly urged residents to conserve water but promptly lifted that advisory.
If they could e.g. take out any of the US power grids, why wouldn't they have done so already? The current conflict is pretty existential for that government already, I think.
The CIA and many independent researchers have extensively documented the vulnerabilities in US infrastructure; from SCaDA/ICS, electrical grid, food, municipal/dams/etc, GPS (remember the drones?) and other systems. Even without accelerated LLM discovery of exploits exceeding rates well beyond prior human capability, there are plenty organic, physical vulnerabilities that should have any sane American humble and concerned, if not prepared.
Why would they not do so already? I think that's a fair question, but I wouldn't take a delayed answer as evidence of triviality or cause for arrogance.
This is something I would be grateful to be wrong about, even made a fool for, and embarrassed over. My redneck threat modelling predicted something serious before end of Summer. I abstractly predicted an incident near CENTCOM two weeks prior, and didn't even know anything happened until the friend I mentioned it to called to inform me of it. That was trivial and thwarted, thankfully, but there was an IED, and I suspect it was not ornamental. The media reported it as perpetrated by a Chinese couple, but dropped it pretty quickly with no followups. I assume pure coincidence there, but I'm wired to be paranoid on this subject. There have been other soft predictions, but equally abstract and well within coincidence/chance. All it proves to me was/is that my thinking is aligning with a real threat.
I admit I am relying primarily upon intuition, but also a synthesis of my perspective on global volatility.
Edit: I will just add, as humbly as I can convince one I intend to be; situational awareness is as important as ever. In the age of AI, increased global tensions, economic stress, I seriously advise anyone with the inclination to exercise situational awareness, not in some menacing, moronic vigilante manner, but observationally, whatever the environment, from office, home, park, road, where ever. I think the time has come to make this normal.
We should have critical infrastructure secured whether or not Iran gets super mega big mad.
It's like when the guy taunted the tiger at the SF zoo and then it turned out the tiger could make it over the wall if it was sufficiently pissed off. Not the way to design any of this.
kind of thing where a third party investigatory group would be great if executed correctly -- although I haven't seen evidence of that being possible yet, either.
until then we're (and by we I mean any citizen of anyplace, anywhere) always going to be getting attacked by the target of the administration's ire (any administration), always.