Feds Admit Water Pump Failure Was Not Cyber Attack

DHS advisor hastily told Washington Post incident was foreign cyber attack

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wedneday, November 23, 2011

Despite a Department of Homeland Security advisor hastily telling the Washington Post that foreign hackers were responsible for the failure of a pump at an Illinois water plant earlier this month in a bid to drum up support for more government control over the Internet, federal authorities have been forced to admit that there is no evidence to support the claim.

“Curran-Gardner water district officials are happy that federal officials have ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of a water pump failure at the district,” reports The State-Journal Register.

“The whole thing was a general pain,” Don Craven, a trustee of the Curran-Gardner Township Public Water District, said Tuesday.

“First, they tell us that it’s the first instance of cyber hacking in the entire world, and everyone goes nuts. Now, all of a sudden, they tell us it’s not.”

DHS and FBI officials have confirmed that they have discovered no evidence of cyber intrusion or any other malicious activity by foreign or domestic hackers.

This marks a stark contrast to reports last week, which focused around the alarmist rhetoric of Homeland Security advisor Joe Weiss, who told the Washington Post, “This is a big deal….It was tracked to Russia. It has been in the system for at least two to three months. It has caused damage. We don’t know how many other utilities are currently compromised.”

The Post ran the story under the headline, Foreign hackers targeted U.S. water plant in apparent malicious cyber attack, expert says. Although the newspaper cited a report obtained by Weiss that was “unknown and impossible to immediately verify,” they still ran with the story, setting off an onslaught of subsequent fearmongering about how more cybersecurity powers were essential to prevent further attacks.

Indeed, on Monday Weiss was back in the news, telling the Toronto Star that the “attack” was “scary” and had “enormous implications” for infrastructure security.

As the Activist Post pointed out last week, the incident was hastily used to drum up support for increasing cybersecurity powers and government control over the Internet, before the true cause of the pump failure had actually been confirmed.

As we have previously reported, the threat to public infrastructure from cyber terrorism has been greatly exaggerated by authorities as part of en effort to justify increased state control over the world wide web and mandate a figurative kill switch for the Internet.

However, the most damaging cyber attack launched to date, the Stuxnet worm, was the work of the United States and Israel, the two countries most urgently pushing for cybersecurity powers to curb cyber attacks.

After months of so-called “experts” blaming Stuxnet on foreign powers or cyberterrorists, the New York Times reported in January that the attack was “A joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.”