U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of New York Preet Bharara, announced the indictment on Thursday
WASHINGTON DC – Seven alleged hackers with ties to the Iranian government have been indicted for cybercrimes. One of those dealt with the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye.
In the Westchester case Hamid Firoozi, 34, is accused of repeatedly obtaining unauthorized access to the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems in August and September 2013. It cost $30,000 to correct the breached technology.
At the time of the alleged intrusion, the dam was undergoing maintenance and had been disconnected from the system. If it was online, that access would have given Firoozi the ability to control water levels and flow rates – an outcome that federal authorities said could have posed a clear danger to the public health and safety of Americans.
Westchester County Executive Robert Astorino said while the Bowman Avenue Dam “may seem inconsequential, the attempt to hack it was not.” He is concerned that any knowledge gained from that hack could be applied by terrorists to other, much larger targets.
“That’s not to say that the next target can’t be something huge like maybe through cyber-terrorism get into an FAA airport tower or the controls of a much bigger dam, or the power grid,” Astorino said. “These are the things that presumably they are practicing on to see if they can break into. If they were able to do it to some extent on a very small dam here in Westchester, then God only knows what they are going to try to do in the future.”
All seven defendants are charged with attacks against 46 victims primarily in the financial sector, between late 2011 and mid-2013. The attacks disabled victim bank websites, prevented customers from accessing their accounts online and collectively cost the victims tens of millions of dollars in remediation costs as they worked to neutralize and mitigate the attacks on their servers.
All of those indicted face up to 10 years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit and aid and abet computer hacking. Firoozi faces an additional five years in prison for hacking into the Bowman Dam system.
Astorino was upset when the case first broke because he read about it in the Wall Street Journal and was not briefed by federal authorities. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the way it was handled and the feds have come to an agreement that he will be notified immediately in situations like this.
