What's In Your Water Now? Hackers
Hackers are known for attacking the computers of banks and government agencies. Now they have a new favorite target: the U.S. water system.
In an unsettling new report on cyber attacks against the nation’s critical infrastructure, the Department of Homeland Security said that water plants were targeted 81 times in 2011, compared with only two incidents in 2010.
Last year’s attacks accounted for about 40 percent of the online assaults against U.S. control systems, which are computers that run industrial facilities. There were 198 attacks on control systems in 2011, a nearly fivefold increase over 2010 when the number was 41, according to the agency’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT).
