Minnesota Water Hack, Colorado River Woes, and Bl. Stanley Rother

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The issues that matter most, right here. The Drew Mariani Show.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
On Relevant Radio.
The FBI and the EPA issuing a warning to water and wastewater facilities nationwide about the increasing risk posed by hackers. After a cyber attack on dozens of water systems in Minnesota, an attack officials say could be linked to Iran. Water utilities in at least seven states have reported incidents. Officials say the hackers are targeting programmable controllers and are modifying passwords to lock out operators. The hack in Minnesota did not cause any water safety issues, but one town did have to provide residents with water from a storage tank after hackers shut down normal water flows.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:45)
It's The Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio.

**Drew Mariani** (0:49)
Hey, good afternoon and welcome. Did you hear about this story?
If you have not, it's not just Minnesota. I want to bring you up to speed on something that has just given me pause. I'm a concern. This might be the new normal. I'm hoping it is not. First of all, it's great to be here with you today. Thanks for joining me on Drew Mariani. I've got a great lineup of show and content for you, and I hope you'll be able to join me all throughout the day. If there's something on your mind, there's a question, you want to join the conversation, the best way to do that is dialing in to 888-914-9149.
Two things before I talk about what's happening to our nation's water supply, and I am not here to be apocalyptic or too frightening to you. I had reported on Open AI not too long ago. Remember that story where apparently they were doing some experiment in what they called a sandbox, and a sandbox is basically a way that they have their, it's a way to, it's a testing sandbox, a digital prison that was supposed to be, not be connected to the internet, it was disconnected from the internet, the AI had no way of getting out, yet it somehow got out, it found a way to escape that digital sandbox, and it hacked another company, a company called Hugging, right, Hugging Face. I just saw another story this morning, Anthropic, right, and I like Anthropic. They said that on Thursday, their software, it was testing as well, it somehow got on to the internet, and guess what, it hacked three unsuspecting companies, without the AI makers knowing about it. They had no knowledge of this.
Three separate incidents is dating all the way back to April. So here's the deal. You've got AI following the command of its creator, right? And that's what happens here. You know, you give an AI command and it will act autonomously to complete that task or that action. It's kind of a scary thought in some respects if they're not good guardrails for it. So when I hear about this, and by the way, the president, just as a separate note here before I get to Eric, the Trump administration announced new restrictions on preventing Chinese humanoid robots and robotic dogs from entering into sensitive American infrastructures. This is a whole new world. Why? Well, they worry that these machines walking through, let's say, as a warehouse or a factory, they could see, they could hear, they could map, they could transmit if they're connected to, let's say, a foreign network or influenced by hostile governments. And that would be a huge national security problem for the US. Elon Musk, I keep saying it, I read a report where he wants 100 million robots in the next five to seven years in the homes of Americans. Who knows what the world is like? You have AI escaping digital sandboxes and you see them hacking. And then today you hear this report, and this is what Eric is going to talk to me about, your water supply. There was a coordinated cyber attack against 30 community water systems in Minnesota, 30 of them. It's not some random, I don't know, water system, it's not two, it was 30, it was 30 And federal investigators, the FBI, they say that hackers targeted the computerized operational technology to help run these facilities. A lot of these facilities are old. Their technology dates back to the 70s and 80s. And to upgrade this type of stuff will cost tens of millions of dollars. So they're vulnerable.
In one city, as you heard in our news report at the top of the hour, they lost control. People had to have water given to them. Now again, no water was contaminated. If you're in Minnesota, your water is okay. But the EPA and the FBI and the NSA and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, they've already warned that Iranian-affiliated hackers are targeting US water supplies right now. And my final thought on this, and we'll get Eric Ebner's take, if your life depends on infrastructure, right? Water. What would happen if our water was cut off? What about our power grid? Something I've been talking about a long time. What if your electricity went out? Your natural gas. What about those children in the NICUs and the PICUs? What about that person under surgery? What about transportation? What about the medications you need? What about communication and banking? Nearly every one of those systems now relies on computers that are connected directly or indirectly to networks, that if they're hacked by the enemy, they can bring America to its knees. So I think the future of war is not just with bullets, planes and tanks. I think it's going to be malicious computer code. Let's talk to Eric about it. He is the Chief Technology Officer for 360 Security Services, a specialist in cybersecurity. You check him out at 360security.services.