Federal investigators are looking into a report that hackers managed to remotely shut down a utility's water pump in central Illinois last week, in what could be the first known foreign cyber attack on a U.S. industrial system.
The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI on Wednesday shot down reports that a cyber attack recently took down a pump at an Illinois public water utility.
Remember the cyber attack on a Springfield, Ill. public water utility that resulted in the destruction of one of its pumps last month? It turns out the whole affair was a comedy of attribution errors—the utility was never hacked, the pump wasn't "destroyed" but rather burned out from use, and the shady Russian hacker who logged into the facility's SCADA system was actually a legit contractor who happened to be vacationing in Russia.