Top White House cyber aide says recent Iran hack on water system is call to tighten cybersecurity

Recent attacks on American water authorities by Iranian-aligned hackers — as well as a separate spate of ransomware attacks hitting the U.S. health care system — are calling federal officials to action

A top White House national security official said recent cyber attacks by Iranian hackers on U.S. water authorities — as well as a separate spate of ransomware attacks on the health care industry — should be seen as a call to action by utilities and industry to tighten cybersecurity.

Deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger said in an interview on Friday that recent attacks on multiple American organisations by the Iranian hacker group “Cyber Av3ngers" were “unsophisticated” and had “minimal impact” on operations. But the attacks, Neuberger said, offered a fresh warning that American companies and operators of critical infrastructure “are facing persistent and capable cyber attacks from hostile countries and criminals” that are not going away.

“Some pretty basic practices would have made a big difference there,” said Neuberger, who serves as a top adviser to President Joe Biden on cyber and emerging technology issues. “We need to be locking our digital doors. There are significant criminal threats, as well as capable countries — but particularly criminal threats — that are costing our economy a lot.”

The hackers, who U.S. and Israeli officials said are tied to Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, breached multiple organisations in several states including a small municipal water authority in the western Pennsylvania town of Aliquippa. The hackers said they were specifically targeting organisations that used programmable logic controllers made by the Israeli company Unitronics, commonly used by water and water treatment utilities.

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Matthew Mottes, the chairman of the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, which discovered it had been hacked on Nov 25, said that federal officials had told him the same group also breached four other utilities and an aquarium.

The Aliquippa hack prompted workers to temporarily halt pumping in a remote station that regulates water pressure for two nearby towns, leading crews to switch to manual operation.