In January, Russian hackers caused a small Texas town’s water tank to overflow, in a rare but worrying attack on U.S. infrastructure.
Russian hacking group Sandworm is likely responsible for the attack on the Muleshoe, Texas, water system, cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Wednesday.
Mandiant called the group a “dynamic and operational threat actor, actively engaged across the full spectrum of espionage, attack and influence operations.”
Security experts said they believed the group was likely linked to the Russian spy agency GRU. While most state-backed “threat groups” specialize in specific areas, like intelligence gathering or network sabotage, Sandworm is the only one that attempts to unify each capability into one comprehensive package, a Mandiant reported.
The hackers posted a video on Telegram of themselves tampering with Muleshoe’s water system, showing how they overpowered it and reset the controls, according to the Washington Post.
In the videos, the hackers refer to themselves as the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn. This is the first attack on a US public infrastructure system by this group, according to the Post. US officials blamed Iran for another attack on water systems in Pennsylvania last November, according to CNN.
Muleshoe City Manager Ramon Sanchez told CNN the city’s water tank overflowed for about 30 to 35 minutes.
Authorities have previously blamed Sandworm, which has gone by different names over the years, for various attacks around the world, including against Ukraine’s power grid and against the 2018 Olympics in South Korea.
In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice charged six members of the group with crimes related to its attacks, one of whom it said was also involved in disrupting the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The Justice Department also accused the men of creating a virus called NotPetya, which caused $10 billion in damage to computers worldwide, knocking out the power grid in Ukraine and knocking out computer systems owned by a chain of hospitals in western Pennsylvania.
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