14 DAY TRIAL // The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a cyber-attack from 2013 when a group of hackers linked to an Iranian APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) breached the computers of a US dam.
The incident took place at the Bowman Avenue Dam, in the village of Rye Brook, New York state, less than 20 miles (32 kilometers) from New York City. The dam is only 20 feet (6 meters) tall and was built to cater to an ice manufacturing factory during the mid-20th century.
The hackers were specialized in hacking banks, breached the dam by accident
Authorities said that hackers only probed around the computers connected to the damn's ICS (Industrial Control Systems). They admit that, if they knew what they had breached, the hackers could have controlled the dam's water flow and even brought down the dam's drawbridges, releasing its content.
The computer breach took place right after the infamous Stuxnet incident, during which US intelligence infected Iran's nuclear program with a computer virus. The worm, codenamed Stuxnet, was carried inside Iranian nuclear power plants via a USB stick and ended up sabotaging a few centrifuges used for separating nuclear material.
US intelligence has also revealed that the group responsible for the hack previously targeted banking services belonging to Capital One Financial Corp., PNC Financial Services Group, and SunTrust Banks Inc.. It may be because of this specialization in financial entities that the group didn't carry out any cyber-attacks on the dam's internal system.
The energy sector is increasingly targeted by cyber-attacks
In a Chatham House report from the beginning of October, security researchers were decrying the sorry state of security measures used in nuclear power plants.
The reason for such worries, also applicable to other energy sectors, is the fact that the industrial management network is often connected to the enterprise and managerial network, with a direct link to the Internet. This allows attackers to breach the enterprise network, and from there, infiltrate into ICS equipment, which common sense dictates should not be accessible through external connections.
In October, the FBI also said that hackers linked to ISIS had tried to hack the US power grid, with no success.
In September, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the US Department of Energy was hacked 159 times in the last four years.