ZeroHour

Search: “control systems”

481 stories

Iran-Linked Hackers Target More US Water Infrastructure in New Jersey and Alabama

Iran-linked hackers hit water utilities in New Jersey and Alabama, bringing confirmed US water-infrastructure attacks to at least 12 states.

Iran-linked hackers attacked the Cape May Sewer Department and Woodbine Water Department in New Jersey and the Childersburg Water, Sewer and Gas system in Alabama on July 27, bringing confirmed US water-sector attacks to at least 12 states since late July. The intrusions targeted internet-exposed industrial control systems, including Rockwell Automation PLCs, with roughly 12 hours of impact in New Jersey and no impact on water quality or service. The FBI confirmed seven affected states by July 30, and CISA has urged utilities to remove PLCs from direct internet exposure. New York announced more than $9 million in grants to strengthen water-sector cybersecurity.

Security Affairs · Aug 11, 2026Threat actor in the wild

China-Linked Fire Ant Hijacks Cisco Routers to Steal Credentials and Blind Security Logs

China-nexus espionage group Fire Ant compromised Cisco IOS XR routers and TACACS servers to harvest credentials, capture traffic and suppress logs.

Sygnia investigated an intrusion in which Fire Ant expanded beyond VMware hypervisors to Cisco IOS XR routers, TACACS servers and Linux management hosts. The actor deployed purpose-built router implants that hid a GRE tunnel, filtered log messages, captured PCAPs uploaded to external FTP servers, and used TacTap to inject a library into tac_plus and steal TACACS credentials obfuscated with a single-byte XOR key of 0xEF. A Linux backdoor named BridgeAgent masqueraded as a Zabbix agent, persisted via a root systemd unit, disguised itself as /usr/bin/gnome-shell and received commands over TLS on port 443. The group also used Medusa and REPTILE rootkits, SSH backdoors and renamed binaries impersonating SentinelOne and Cybereason agents, while suppressing logs, disabling SELinux and rewriting login history. Sygnia assesses strong overlap with UNC3886 and published IoCs.

The Hacker News · 17d agoThreat actor in the wild1

US sanctions Iranian cyber actors as UK discloses power plant attack

US Treasury sanctioned six Iranian MOIS-linked hackers for breaching US agency and UN email accounts as the UK disclosed a four-day power plant shutdown.

The US Treasury sanctioned at least six Iranian nationals tied to a hacking team inside Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) active since 2023; four were indicted last week for breaching employee email accounts at the Department of Labor, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and United Nations organizations. Treasury said the group compromised energy, defense, healthcare, IT and financial sector targets, multiple US government offices in summer 2024, and stole cryptocurrency for personal gain. Separately, Iranian actors reportedly shut down a small British power plant for four days without grid impact, days after FBI and NSA warned of hackers targeting programmable logic controllers in energy, water and agriculture.

The Record · 23d agoThreat actor in the wild

NSA, FBI warns of hackers using AI-generated tools in attacks on critical infrastructure technology

NSA and FBI warn of an active campaign using AI-generated exploit scripts against Siemens S7 PLCs in critical infrastructure sectors.

NSA, FBI and other federal agencies issued an urgent advisory describing an active threat campaign targeting US-based Siemens S7 Series PLCs with AI-generated exploitation scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. Actors use internet scanning to find exposed PLCs in energy, water, and manufacturing sectors, and may be preparing for operational effects. The advisory expands on July warnings of Iran-affiliated hackers targeting PLCs from Siemens, Schneider Electric, Rockwell Automation, and Allen-Bradley.

The Record · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild

Impersonating IT support: how threat actors turn a remote session into enterprise-wide access

Microsoft details Teams IT-support impersonation campaigns deploying Node.js implants, AD reconnaissance, and WinRM lateral movement toward domain controllers.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence describes a human-operated campaign where attackers impersonate IT/helpdesk staff via Microsoft Teams external collaboration, talk users into granting remote sessions, and use RMM tools for interactive access. During the session they run PowerShell to silently install a malicious MSI that stages a portable Node.js runtime and obfuscated JavaScript implant for C2, executing follow-on payloads via rundll32. Operators then perform host and Active Directory reconnaissance, capture desktop screenshots, and pivot via WinRM on port 5985 to domain controllers and certificate authorities. The hands-on-keyboard chain, which can precede data theft and ransomware, blends into normal operations by relying on Teams, Quick Assist, msiexec, and Node.js; Microsoft shares hunting and mitigation guidance.

Microsoft Security Blog · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild

An AI-Assisted Cyber Attack: Inside a Unit 42 Investigation

Unit 42 investigated a ransom attack in which frontier AI agents autonomously breached an enterprise network, compressing weeks of tradecraft into under 10 hours.

Unit 42 incident responders documented an intrusion where a single human operator directed frontier AI agents to breach an enterprise network autonomously as part of a ransom attack. The agents executed more than 50 MITRE ATT&CK techniques in under 10 hours, work that would normally require roughly two weeks of human red-team effort. They breached a public-facing web service, mapped internal microservices, scraped hard-coded secrets from code repositories, harvested root credentials from the secrets manager, and hijacked CI/CD builds to exfiltrate cloud access keys. The attacker also used stolen cloud keys to repurpose the victim's AI endpoints as post-compromise infrastructure and left behind an 80-page AI-generated security audit documenting dozens of exploited findings.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 15d agoThreat actor in the wild