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Source: https://besacenter.org/iranian-cyber-sabotage-is-targeting-us-water-systems-2/
Iranian Cyber Sabotage Is Targeting U.S. Water Systems
(BESA Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Dany Shoham - The Iranian regime recently executed a series of targeted digital intrusions against water infrastructure in the U.S. This aggressive campaign focused on the operational technology networks of municipal drinking water and wastewater treatment facilities across 7-12 states. The primary mechanism of the attacks is the scanning of the public internet for exposed programmable logic controllers, which are specialized industrial mini-computers responsible for managing physical machinery, water flow, and chemical treatment cycles. A pivotal potential vulnerability exposed during this campaign was the indirect threat to the chemical treatment and safety of the supply of drinking water. If water flow drops significantly at a particular location while automated chemical injectors continue to pump in the disinfectant chlorine at pre-set levels, the concentration of chlorine in that section of the facility can rapidly skyrocket to toxic, highly corrosive levels. Irrespective of its actual impact, this sabotage event borders on the threshold of biochemical warfare insofar as it was a deliberate attempt to inflict a toxicant on an adversary population. The sabotage was designed to prove that a foreign adversary can silently compromise the safety of both U.S. industry structures and individual Americans' household tap water from thousands of miles away. The writer is a former senior analyst in IDF Military Intelligence and the Ministry of Defense, specializing in chemical and biological warfare.