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Iran-Linked Hackers Disrupted US Oil, Gas, Water Sites (thehill.com) 61

Posted by BeauHD from the PSA dept.
The FBI says (PDF) Iran-linked hackers disrupted internet-connected systems used by U.S. oil, gas, and water companies. Even with the recent two-week ceasefire between Iran and the United States and Israel, hackers backing Tehran say they won't end their retaliatory cyberattacks. The Hill reports: The report warned that similar companies across the country should be aware of an increased push by hackers to take over programmable logic controller (PLC) systems, which can be used to digitally control physical machinery from remote locations. Secure internet access for PLCs from one company, Rockwell Automation, were removed by Iran-linked coders who then "maliciously interacted with project files and altered data," according to the report. Hackers first gained access to some of the platforms in January of last year. All access to compromised platforms ended in March, the report said. The FBI said the move resulted in "operational disruption" and "financial loss."

[...] Rockwell Automation wasn't the only company to recently face cyberattacks from Iran-linked hackers. Stryker, a major U.S. medical device maker, was targeted by Iran-affiliated coders in mid-March. It was unclear if physical operations were affected by the security breach. FBI Director Kash Patel was personally impacted by hackers who leaked his emails and records related to his personal travels and business from more than 10 years ago. [...]

The FBI urged companies to adopt network defenders and multifactor authentication to prevent future attacks. Tuesday's report was published alongside the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. "Government and experts have been warning about internet connected systems for years, and how vulnerable they are," one source familiar with the federal investigation into the hacks told CNN. Many companies have "ealready removed those systems and followed the guidance," the person added.

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Iran-Linked Hackers Disrupted US Oil, Gas, Water Sites

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  • We cut back on cyber security (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @06:09PM (#66084114)
    So that Russia could have more access to our politicians and voters. It worked Trump's president again. But it does mean that we are substantially more vulnerable to other attacks. Especially when a senile old man can easily be tricked into starting a war that even Bush Jr wasn't dumb enough to start...

    As for Iran yeah, we attacked them without any reason to do so. We already had a perfectly good deal to stop them from building nukes. But it came from a black man so it had to go.

    And now it looks like all told this little adventure is going to cost us about a trillion dollars. That's another trillion dollars of debt and inflation. Almost as if electing a well-known rapist and pedophile with a long history of bankrupting businesses including casinos was a bad idea...

    Funny thing is I don't see anyone defending El presidente in public anymore. Trolls will yell TDS at me but they never actually defend his actions anymore. Not outside of their safe spaces.

    And despite $4 a gallon gas and a huge wave of inflation about to hit in a few months that we all know is coming, Trump still somehow has a 36 to 40% approval rate depending on the poll. I don't even know what you do about that it's fucking insane.

    • Re:We cut back on cyber security (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Samantha Wright ( 1324923 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @06:42PM (#66084170) Homepage Journal

      Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

      These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let [reuters.com] Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial [wikipedia.org]...

      • Re:We cut back on cyber security (Score:4, Interesting)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @07:46PM (#66084266)
        There's nothing ironic about it they got what they paid for. People forget that Trump was a Russian stooge for ages. The reason he wasn't bankrupted during his most incompetent business deals is because he was laundering money for the Russian mafia.

        Never mind the fact that Russia and the Israeli government both have massive amounts of dirt on Trump thanks to his long-term friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. You would have to be incredibly naive not to know that the Russian government has evidence of trump raping kids. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. We learn from the Epstein files that the Russians provided a lot of girls to Jeffrey Epstein and we have eight credible women accusing Trump of raping them when they were children details of which have been corroborated by several journalists.

        The problem is you can lay out all the evidence and proof of that but nobody is going to believe you because it's too fucking insane to think that we elected a pedophile who is under the control of a hostile foreign Nation to be president of the United states. I don't think the human brain is capable of grasping the enormity of that.

        You get the same problem with things like the Iran Contra affair or how Ronald Reagan arranged for Americans to be held hostage so that he could win his election. It's just something that you don't want to believe is true no matter how true it is because you don't want to face a world that fucked up.

        • Re:We cut back on cyber security (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gtall ( 79522 ) on Thursday April 09, 2026 @07:51AM (#66084876)

          I thought it would be good to keep a running list of the Benefits to the Epstein-Iran War:

          1. Iran gets control of the Strait of Hormuz
          2. Iran gets its oil restrictions lifted by the U.S.
          3. Russia gets its oil restrictions lifted by the U.S.
          4. The Iranian regime gets stronger and can now spend more on the Basiji to keep control
          5. The Iranian regime now gets to tax tankers going through the Strait.
          6. American and world consumers get higher gas prices
          7. American and world consumers get higher prices for everything as the higher oil prices filter through
          8. NATO has been weakened due to la Presidenta’s hissy fits
          9. The world has learned ways of disentangling themselves from the U.S. and its economy
          10. Congress is even more diminished since they failed to step up and stop that dementia patient
          11. Other nations no longer look to the U.S. for inspiration thus leaving the world at the mercy of China and Russia
          12. Other nations can no longer trust the U.S. political system which has been show to be brittle and susceptible to authoritarian takeover
          13. Other nations can no longer trust the American people who could just as easily elect another lunatic

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      Nah, lazy dumbasses connected critical infrastructure to the internet so they could control this stuff from home. The greedy were happy to go along because it meant they didn't have to pay a night crew.
      • No, they paid a guy in Romania to architect the system. Or more likely, the fake "PLC expert" guy at the plant paid a guy in Romania to do the work. I worked at a company where a guy opened notepad during a customer demo of a convoluted system with lots of PLCs and typed "start demonstration" and the system magically sprung to life. It was immediately realized the text instructions were for the Romanian developer who actually did all the work over teamviewer. Mind you this was five years before chatgpt

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      "El presidente"? Please get the gender correct, it is "la Presidenta".

      As much as I agree with your post, the JCPOA would be ending about now regardless because of it's sunset provisions, so we'd still have la Presidenta (known around the WH as Mr. Pee) destroying any chance for a new agreement.

      Inflation is going to increase even without the increase in energy prices. It seems the American West and Mid-American West is desiccating due to lack of snow and rain this past winter. Farmers in Nebraska are out of

  • Uh oh! This is worse than the routers problem. Time to ban PLCs! /s

  • Absolutely needless (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @06:51PM (#66084184)

    So now we have to deal with an energy crunch, big gas prices for a few months, a potential global recession and Iran still gets to control Hormuz with a fancy new tax (which Trump said today we might take part in collection fees? So the terrible regime now we're gonna jump into business with?) and for what?

    To stop them from making a nuke? When we were told their nuclear capability was obliterated months ago (remember that?!?) and when we could have simply continued or renegotiated inspections from the JCPOA but instead Trump scuttled that his first term.

    And before anyone starts no, I'm not going to shed any tears for dead ayatollahs but that doesn't make this whole thing an embarrassing boondoggle and it certainly doesn't help almost 6 years of Trump regime foreign policy being a fucking joke that has made us look like lunatics on the world stage while China gets to sit back and plug away at building more tech and infrastructure. (also notice that there's not even mention of an infrastructure bill this term after so much talk in the first? yeah because Biden actually got it done. Twice. That's a real deal-maker.)

    There's something to be said that both parties are the same in that they will both go play world police sometimes but for Republicans that means being the piece of shit corrupt cop.

    • It's not difficult - Iran must be balkanized if Israel is going to conquer the Middle East and expand its proper borders to "those promised by God". They will demand a regional empire beyond their borders as a "buffer zone".

      The Eschatological Christian Zionists want them tp destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple so Jesus can come back. Much of the Senior Brass at DoD (or Department of War Crimes) believes in this.

      Is it all absurd and crazy? Doesn't matter, it's what motivates the people wi

      • We do live in a crazy world where trump's minions would prefer he commit genocide rather than be exposed as diddling underage girls. I don't even believe they were that young. His "type" is late teens/early twenties, not prepubescent. So almost legal/legal.

        And I'll say one more thing about the genocide. Not since WWII has a leader of a nation that could pull off a genocide actually said he would. Think about that. We and many other countries fought a war with millions dying to stop a genocide. And now we wa

  • I'm not sure what idiots thought it was a good idea but it seems pretty damn irresponsible to connect vital resources to the internet. Frankly, it's past time we had a law where if the NSA can remotely knock your vital infrastructure (for civilization) offline that your company gets to pay a substantial penalty. If it happens a second time within a few years then the company executives get prosecuted for criminal negligence.

    • I'm not sure what idiots thought it was a good idea but it seems pretty damn irresponsible to connect vital resources to the internet.

      We were warned about not hooking up critical infrastructure to the internet back in 1995. [imdb.com] And when AI takes over and destroys the world because everything is connected to the internet, we were warned about that, too. [imdb.com]

      • I wished I had mod points because you deserve a +5 Insightful for that. Really, why are we so lazy? I understand wanting all of that stuff on a network, but put it on a private network that you can only get to if you're at a company site. No bridges either, it's special terminals on the private network or you can't access it. Yeah, it makes things more inconvenient, but that the way it goes: it's always security versus convenience ... pick one.

        • Really, why are we so lazy?

          Optimization is most often a pathway to higher levels of reward. As a result, there is an evolutionary drive that has reinforced the concept of taking the path of least resistance.

          Yeah, it makes things more inconvenient, but that the way it goes: it's always security versus convenience ... pick one.

          Humans are fundamentally at odds with their own nature but this is amplified when you consider which humans are selected for executive positions. As a result of these evolutionary pressures an external force is required to enforce the correct prioritization.

    • Every time such a story comes up someone posts demonstrating they don't understand how these systems work in the modern world. Infrastructure like this is often remote, not easily accessible. There's a world of reasons why you need to access them remotely, both in terms of performance (monitoring, being able to start / stop equipment as needed without having an employee get in a car and drive for hours), as well as legal (having a continuous log of things such as water quality from your SCADA system, or rea

    • But my idiot boss demanded remote desktop access so he can work from home! He also said no complicated passwords because they're too difficult for him to remember.

    • The US managed to hack Iran's nuclear program and that system was not connected to the Internet.

      Internet connectivity does help, but is not required for state-level hacking.

  • It's not a stretch to imagine Iran-based threats are motivated by profit more than nationalism. My bet is they are working just as hard now as they did before war and before the ceasefire. Many threat actors, be they nation-state based or just plain old criminals have sophisticated operations. Any company that doesn't have a firewall, monitored endpoint protection, cloud protection, anti-virus, employee education, 24/7 active monitoring, and more is a target that will be compromised sooner or later... if

  • The FBI says

    ...a lot of shit nobody takes seriously in general, even moreso since the Nazis took them over.

  • If one of the six hydrocoptic marzel vanes fails and is no longer mounted to the lunar wane shaft, side fumbling will no longer be effectively prevented!

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