But they didn't bother to verify this. They just checked logs, found a Russian ip address, and without doing an investigation started shouting "Russian Terror A

But they didn't bother to verify this. They just checked logs, found a Russian ip address, and without doing an investigation started shouting "Russian Terror Attack!" and went to full on red alert. As plausible as that is, it doesn't sound like that's quite what happened here (emphasis mine): "Federal officials confirmed that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were investigating damage to the water plant but cautioned against concluding that it was necessarily a cyber-attack before all the facts could be learned. “At this time there is no credible corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety,” said DHS spokesman Peter Boogaard." "News of the incident became public after Joe Weiss, an industry security expert, obtained a report dated Nov. 10 and collected by an Illinois state intelligence center that monitors security threats. The original source of the information was unknown and impossible to immediately verify."[1] The article (and seemingly all of the others) go on to cite Weiss as the sole source for the claim that it was a hack and "a big deal". From his blog post[2] and more recent posts it sounds like the report he had obtained claimed it was a hack and he publicized it "to highlight a concern that information is not being disseminated in a timely manner", which I suppose is the opposite of full on red alert. I think Weiss was probably trying to make a good point (if you believe the DHS, then not only wasn't information getting disseminated, it was also wrong information) but the press ran with the sexier "We're getting hacked by Russia!" aspect even without verification. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/foreign-hackers-broke-into-illinois-water-plant-control-system-industry-expert-says/2011/11/18/gIQAgmTZYN_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/po... [2] http://community.controlglobal.com/content/water-system-hack-system-broken http://community.controlglobal.com/content/water-system-hack...