Secondo il giornalista americano Bill Gertz l’Intelligence statunitense avrebbe scoperto un’operazione di spionaggio cibernetico ai danni dello “U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams“, un database governativo che contiene informazioni sensibili sulle vulnerabilità delle dighe.
La notizia è stata pubblicata poche ore fa sul sito FreeBeacon.com e sarebbe stata confermata dallo stesso Corps of Engineers. L’intrusione avrebbe avuto luogo a gennaio e sembrerebbe proveniente dalla Cina:

U.S. intelligence agencies traced a recent cyber intrusion into a sensitive infrastructure database to the Chinese government or military cyber warriors, according to U.S. officials.
The compromise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams (NID) is raising new concerns that China is preparing to conduct a future cyber attack against the national electrical power grid, including the growing percentage of electricity produced by hydroelectric dams.
According to officials familiar with intelligence reports, the Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams was hacked by an unauthorized user believed to be from China, beginning in January and uncovered earlier this month. The database contains sensitive information on vulnerabilities of every major dam in the United States. There are around 8,100 major dams across waterways in the United States. […]

Questo evento, assieme a molti altri, fa sorgere il timore che il fine di tali attività di spionaggio cibernetico sia la raccolta di informazioni su vulnerabilità e criticità di un sistema di infrastrutture critiche nazionali allo scopo di attaccarle in caso di conflitto:

Michelle Van Cleave, the former National Counterintelligence Executive, a senior counterintelligence policymaker, said the database compromise highlights the danger posed by hackers who are targeting critical U.S. infrastructure for future attacks.
“In the wrong hands, the Army Corps of Engineers’ database could be a cyber attack roadmap for a hostile state or terrorist group to disrupt power grids or target dams in this country,” Van Cleave said in an email. […]
Van Cleave said the intrusion appears to be part of an effort to collect “vulnerability and targeting data” for future cyber or military attacks.