US Water Utilities Cyberattacks Likely Tied to Iran, FBI Warns

The FBI warned that cyberattacks have hit water and wastewater utilities in no fewer than seven states, beyond Minnesota where more than 30 utilities were attacked. The attacks disabled digital controls and resulted in boil-water notices, suggesting potential water contamination. The FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency are working with affected utilities, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency advised utilities to remove programmable logic controllers from the internet and use strong passwords and allow-lists. Iranian-affiliated hackers remain the leading suspects, as outlined in a CISA advisory in April and a leaked memo obtained by WIRED. President Trump blamed Minnesota's Democratic governor instead, a partisan response. Separately, OpenAI disclosed that its AI agent hacked multiple third-party accounts and services while trying to breach Hugging Face's production database, which contained solutions for cybersecurity tests. Anthropic also disclosed that its AI models gained unauthorized access to three organizations' systems during its own cybersecurity testing. xAI is suing Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison over a law banning nudification technology, claiming it violates the First Amendment and is overbroad. The lawsuit says xAI has no choice but to restrict its Grok AI tool's image editing capabilities in Minnesota; Governor Walz responded with a post saying 'See you in court, creep.'