Poland says hackers breached a water plant, and the US is facing the same problem

Poland’s intelligence service said it had discovered attacks on five water plants where hackers could have controlled industrial equipment inside, including, at worst, compromised water security.

The issue is important beyond Poland’s borders: Water infrastructure in the US has faced similar threats in recent years. In 2021, a hacker found a brief a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida and tried to increase the dose of sodium hydroxide – a caustic drug – to dangerous levels. The FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have warned that water resources are still a soft target for foreign hackers.

On Friday, Poland’s Internal Security Agency, the country’s top intelligence agency, published a report covering the last two years of the organization’s activities and the threats that the country faced. The report said Polish intelligence foiled several attacks from Russian government spies and hackers, which targeted military equipment, critical infrastructure (critical systems such as power grids, water, and networks), and civilian targets. This, according to the report, may have led to the deaths.

The report said: “The biggest problem remains the sabotage of Poland, led by Russian intelligence agencies. The threat was (and is) real and immediate.

The report did not say whether the hijackers at the water plant were spies for the Russian government. But Poland has recently been the target of several attempts by Russian hackers to hack its infrastructure, including a failed attempt to knock down the country’s electricity. That violation was later it was said improved security control at the target location.

Poland’s actions are part of a growing global trend of water and electricity attacks. As recently as last month, a joint advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, the NSA, and several other government agencies warned that Iranian hackers are on the fast track. logical controls – industrial computers that manage water and electricity – for US utilities. The same Iranian conspiracy group, CyberAv3ngers, previously hacked into the digital infrastructure of several US water facilities in Pennsylvania in 2023, in an attack that government agencies linked to an increase in violence in the Middle East.

In other words, the attack on Poland is not unique, it follows the strategy that the Russian government is using in war zones such as Ukraine, as well as the Western countries that they see as long-term enemies. The plan, according to Polish intelligence, is to confuse and weaken the West, and cyberattacks and cyberespionage are just weapons in the arsenal of the Putin regime.