The "Russki Water-Pump Gambit"? Ummh, No

It was fun while it lasted.

An Illinois water-utility pump failed.  Someone looked at the SCADA logs and found a Russian IP address.

The water district passed the information to the Environmental Protection Agency, which governs rural water systems. “Why we did that, I think it was just out of an abundance of caution,” says Don Craven, a water district trustee. “If we had a problem we would have to report it to EPA eventually.”

But from there, the information made its way to the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center, a so-called fusion center composed of Illinois State Police and representatives from the FBI, DHS and other government agencies.

Yah, well.  The utility had called a SCADA systems expert a few months back--while he was on vacation in Russia--and he had logged in to check a systems problem.

Whoever wrote the fusion center report assumed that someone had hacked Mimlitz’s computer and stolen his credentials in order to use them to hack into Curran Gardner’s SCADA system and sabotage the water pump. It’s not clear whether it was the computer repairman or the fusion center that first jumped to this conclusion.

A spokeswoman for the Illinois State Police, which is responsible for the fusion center, pointed the finger at local representatives of DHS, FBI and other agencies who are responsible for compiling information that gets released by the fusion center.

“We did not create the report,” said spokeswoman Monique Bond. “The report is created by a number of agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, and we basically are just the facilitator of the report. It doesn’t originate from the [fusion center] but is distributed by the [fusion center].”

Oh, well.  Back to normal, such as that is.