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Iran-Linked Hackers Disrupted US Oil, Gas, Water Sites (thehill.com) 93

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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  • 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 li

    • 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, Troll)

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )

        Maybe put a giant beautiful windmill on every green. For golf courses on coastal regions,

        They already do that for mini-golf.

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

  • Absolutely needless (Score:5, 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 don't think Trump can be blackmailed. Every time some new evidence that he's garbage comes to light, we just set the bar lower.

    • 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.

      If you've got one bad cop and one "good" cop enabling him, you've got two bad cops. Both parties always vote for more funding for war, which is how this was even possible in the first place.

      • Good thing I didn't say one was being a good cop. But for real, the absolute gulf (heh) between Biden (and a theoretical Harris) and Trump on foreign policy is very apparent.

        Degrees and scale have to still mean something.

  • 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.

        • You clearly have never worked in one of these environments. These PLCs don't just run everything by themselves; in fact, connecting them to an external system is pretty much required. In almost every case, they are monitoring temperatures, pressures, levels, etc and transmitting that information to a SCADA (or similar) so that control operators can make adjustments, call for maintenance, etc. Much of the data they collect is useed for making business decisions and very likely is subject to reporting require

          • I admit I've not worked in this sort of business, however I have worked on defense contracts where security was priority #2, right behind making the thing we were working on work. Convenience was far down the list. You can have a connection that writes outward only, hence you can get your data in near real-time but the system itself can't be changed from the outside. In the worst case, you copy the needed data to some media that is moved to an outside network, do that on whatever frequency is required, whet

    • Re:Stop connecting it to the internet (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday April 09, 2026 @04:04AM (#66084728)

      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 real time billing for gas flows to online portals, or god forbid your leak detection system on your pipeline detects a leak but there's no one there to look at the telemetry and addrss it before it turns into a huge environmental catastrophe).

      It's not the early 1900s anymore. From the moment we had the ability to send signals over wires, signals from such facilities by necessity entered and left the facility. In some ways we at least had some semblance of security back in the days of leased-lines instead of the public internet, but even then we were at the whims of infrastructure run by an ISP.

      Virtually *ALL* infrastructure these days has some connection to the internet, usually via VPNs, separated by firewalls, often several layers, never perfect, and always because modern infrastructure actually requires it.

      • Were these sites not there before the internet?

        • Back then they probably used leased line modems.

          • And modems no longer exist?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by kackle ( 910159 )
              *20* years ago our customers were complaining about the leased phone line expense and the time it took for any phone company repairs. That's when we started offering cellular radio telemetry, but those modems come with Internet IP addresses now. Local radio connections seem safer, but still the operators often want remote access to the main data collector (computer) over their phones, etc.
              • Ok so it's the same old story.. costs are saved and quality suffers. The fact that they may get hacked was considered and waved off with the cost savings chosen instead.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by kackle ( 910159 )
                  I'd imagine, however I do remember at least two customers worried about the multiple days it took for the phone company to resolve their line problems. Having their SCADA system down for days was not good. It seems the local phone company no longer cared, probably thinking that their cellular offerings were the way to more money.
              • You do know that you can get cellular without public IP addresses right? Security is rarely a technical problem, its usually a question of convenience and cost.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by kackle ( 910159 )
                  I'm aware, in fact those addresses were more expensive to obtain. I was just simplifying the post.

            • And modems no longer exist?

              We still have modems. They are used to connect to the internet. You know what doesn't exist? Leased lines. I was part of a project that was literally forced to replace such a leased line with an internet connection. We still used a modem.

              Point to Point networks are insanely rare these days.

              But since you're living in the past, an old leased line and modem can't even keep up with the data requirements of a remote pumping station, let alone the data requirements of a larger facility. An old leased line and mod

        • Control networks were around long before "the internet" existed. Remote sites like these would probably have employed a mixture of strip chart recorders collected at regular intervals (still in use to this day), a VHF/UHF radio link, maybe even a satellite uplink. You probably did less actual control because the link might have been one-way, but if you are running an oil well, there is also storage tank filling up that you needed to get a signal from the high level switch telling you to get your ass out the

        • Yes they were. They used to run poorly. They used to have quality issues. They used to incidents. They used to respond slowly to disturbances. Just like the internet enabled faster online communication it also enabled faster better and tighter control of industrial facilities.

          • But where they hacked? So you are saying being hacked is worth solving the issues. That's fine, it just seems a steep price to pay. All I'm saying is that you did it to yourself.

    • 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 Fucking Big Idiots say (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @10:22PM (#66084458) Homepage Journal

    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!

  • Only an idiot would critical infrastructure controls online

  • Never gets old.

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