Is America’s Drinking Water the Next Front in the Iran War?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (0:30)
From The New York Times, I'm Zolan Kano-Youngs filling in as host. This is The Daily.
A growing number of cities and towns across the US have reported that their water systems have been hacked. The Times found that the operation was likely perpetrated by Iran. Today, my colleague Dustin Volz, on the long-standing infrastructure vulnerabilities exposed by the recent hacks, and how Iran may be seeking a new kind of leverage in the war that affects something as elemental as the water we drink.
It's Friday, August 7th. Dustin, my guy, we both work in the Washington Bureau. We both live in the same DC neighborhood, and now we are together on The Daily. I'm so happy you are here. This is your first time on the show, right?

**Dustin Volz** (1:40)
Live in the dream. Yeah, first time. I'm really happy to be here.

**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (1:43)
We're both living the dream. All right. Excellent. You cover intelligence and cybersecurity, and I know that national security officials have long warned about the cyber threat from Iran. But this hack that you've been covering, impacting water systems in states across the country, this seems different, is it?

**Dustin Volz** (2:02)
It is different, yes. What we are living through right now is the stuff seemingly of sensationalized Hollywood thrillers. Wow. A suspected foreign power, which officials tell me is likely to be Iran, breaking into municipal water systems throughout the country and harming the Trump administration and state officials in a way that we really have not seen before.

**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (2:25)
Okay. So what happened? Walk me through what we know.

**Dustin Volz** (2:28)
So the timeline here, it really picks up first at the beginning of war in February, when federal officials, the cybersecurity agency at DHS and others issued public alerts saying Iranian linked hackers are targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, and here's the typical computers that they're looking at trying to break into. But these alerts sort of happen all the time, they're easy to ignore, it's sort of unclear exactly how serious it is, and even if it's occurring, what the hackers might want to be doing with it. But clearly, when the United States is at war with foreign power, cyber attacks are something that can become a more pressing concern, especially when that foreign power like Iran can't necessarily retaliate with missiles of its own that can reach the continental United States.

**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (3:14)
Right. These alerts might not be necessarily unusual, but when we are in an active war with Iran, suddenly, there's a bit more of a red alert vibe going on here.

**Dustin Volz** (3:25)
Absolutely.
Fast forward to mid-July, when this alert from a cybersecurity agency at DHS is revised to then show that these Iran-linked hackers are breaking into these critical infrastructure networks, but they're not just getting in now. They're doing really interesting, kind of crafty things that we previously hadn't seen publicly reported. And that activity betrayed a level of familiarity and a level of sophistication from these hackers that not only showed that they kind of knew what they were doing, but that their intentions may be a lot more sinister than what we may be previously realized. So this warning lands July 22nd, again, doesn't necessarily get a ton of attention, but about four days later...

**SPEAKER_5** (4:15)
They didn't break in through the door, they cracked the code through the internet.

**Dustin Volz** (4:19)
We start seeing reports first out of Minnesota of widespread hacking activity targeting dozens of municipal water systems.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:29)
Right now several Minnesota cities are scrambling to respond to cyber attacks targeting their water systems.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:35)
Now in addition to Plymouth, South St. Paul, Maple Plain and Bram.

**Dustin Volz** (4:39)
And the states and others say that it looks like a coordinated campaign.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:45)
Some of the systems targeted reported flooding and a loss of pressure, in some cases even shutting it down completely.

**Dustin Volz** (4:52)
And the Minnesota disclosure turns out to really just be the tip of the spear.

**SPEAKER_8** (4:58)
Several states are seeing cyber attacks on their water systems.

**SPEAKER_9** (5:01)
Minnesota, Michigan and Georgia are among at least seven states now.