A vaguely worded warning from the Trump administration on Tuesday said that hackers backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had begun a series of cyberattacks on water and energy systems across the United States.
But the warning, issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, did not name specific facilities that had been struck or say whether any damage had been done. It said only that the attacks were focusing on equipment made by a major American producer of computer controllers.
The report was issued in conjunction with the F.B.I., the National Security Agency and the Energy Department, and said that the purpose of the Iranian-affiliated attacks was “to cause disruptive effects within the United States.”
Most of the equipment targeted by the group, the report said, were “programmable logic controllers” made by Rockwell Automation, which turns out a widely used line of what are known as Allen-Bradley controllers.
The notice urged utilities and government agencies to make sure none of those controllers were connected to the web. The report did not mention the largest producer of such controllers, Siemens.
When the United States and Israel conducted a sophisticated attack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges 16 years ago, it reached the systems through Siemens controllers. Iran created its own offensive cyberattack groups shortly thereafter.
President Trump has attacked the organization’s election security operations since it declared, in 2020, that the presidential election was one of the most secure ever run in the United States and rejected Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of fraud.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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