Short and to the point for this post.
Yesterday, it was made known that Muleshoe, TX experienced a cyber breach. As a result of this breach there was a physical spillover at the location.
Sandworm, part of the digital hacking army attached to GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) have long touted their goals and successes of interrupting infrastructure operations of foreign nations. This incident in Texas may be the first ever water disruption as a result of a cyber breach.
This is concerning for a lot of reasons, let's take a look at a few of them:
The collective "We / Security Industry" have known that Sandworm was / is conducting these operations for quite some time. They are not shy about it and often flaunt their successes in videos or screen recordings posted to various Telegram groups. With this being the case, and for a million other reasons it begs the question - have our critical infrastructure facilities been sufficiently hardened against cyber attacks? The surface answer is obviously no. To be fair, funding for advanced cyber strategies like more frequent penetration testing, exploit remediation and automation has been hard to come by for most - where other budget areas are prioritized over cyber security.
There was a physical result of a digital breach. We're all familiar with ransomware, extortion and data theft - they're almost commonplace at this point. However, it is much rarer to experience a physical result from a digital breach. Not unheard of, but very uncommon. If a spillover can be caused by a cyber breach, what else can be done? Explosions, equipment failures, chemical imbalances...the answer is yes to all of these.
Russia hacked our water supply. Let that sink in for a moment.
Is this the first time this has happened? Not really. Critical infrastructure cyber breaches are not as uncommon as you would think. However, cyber breaches that result in physical actions - if not the first, this is ONE OF the first for the water infrastructure in the United States.
We're following the situation closely and have reached out to both Texas and Muleshoe officials to provide assistance.
Further updates to follow.
Stay Secure - Patrick
