Iran has successfully hacked America's water supply: What You Should Know

Washington is calling for urgent action and tightening of cyber security

While much of America was busy embarking on the Holiday Season in late November, Iranian hackers were quietly infiltrating the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa (MWAA), a small town with a population of nine thousand in Pennsylvania. MWAA identified the fissure after losing communication with the compromised device made by the Israeli-based Unitronics Vision. The intrusion shut down one of the pump stations, compelling it to run in manual mode, but did not impact access to safe drinking water, according to the United States government.

The attack is attributed to the Iranian-tied hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers – and it turns out that MWAA was merely one in a string of recent compromises of water utility stations on American soil. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) stated that CyberAv3ngers are “actively targeting and compromising” facilities with the Unitronics programmable logic controllers, subsequently breaching video screens with the message “You have been hacked, down with Israel. Every equipment ‘made in Israel’ is CyberAv3ngers legal target.”

It remains unknown how many organizations have been affected. However, several water facilities are reported to have been compromised, further amplifying the vulnerability of the U.S.’s critical infrastructure to cyberattacks from adverse players.