President Barack Obama's administration is gearing up to publicly attribute the hacking incident against New York City dam in 2013 to Iranian hackers, says US Media.
Reuters reported that the US Justice Department has prepared formal charges against the hackers, and a public announcement could come out as early as next week. US officials believe that the hackers failed to gain access to the operational system of Bowman Avenue Dam, which is a flood control system around 30 miles north of New York City. However, some back office systems were penetrated.
Although the hacking incident was not considered 'sophisticated,' it alarmed the Obama administration officials who have voiced concerns about the vulnerability of US infrastructures to online hacking. The spokesman of the Justice Department and the White House declined to make any comment on plans to attribute blame for the hacking.
According to CNN, the public attribution of the New York dam cyberattack is part of the country's strategy shift in recent years to publicly 'name and shame' nations and people behind the hacking whose targets are US government networks and companies. Chief Security firm Cryptzone and a former chief of cyber investigations for the FBI in New York, Leo Taddeo, said the US private sector establishments that operate the nation's vital infrastructures need the government's help to discourage cyberattacks.
The New York dam hackers appeared to have used a malicious software tools and US investigators were perplexed as to why a relatively small piece of US infrastructure was targeted. US Senator Charles Schumer previously said that the cyberattacks in New York served as a wake-up call to everyone, say Lohud Journal News. Schumer at the time called on the Department of Homeland Security to dig deeper into the attack and determine how the breach happened and analyze how vulnerable the US' infrastructure is to hacking.
In 2014, the Justice Department charged five Chinese military hackers for intruding into the networks of several US businesses in order to steal confidential information. Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation publicly named North Korea as the one responsible for the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.
