Investigators are still trying to determine who hacked into the controls for Pixley Irrigation District’s main turnout off of Deer Creek last month.
A gate got stuck in “manual” mode when it should have operated remotely in automatic mode.
Pixley’s water resources superintendent Kirk Masters called the incident a “hiccup” that was discovered on June 22, the first day of the district’s summer water run. Masters reported it at Pixley’s July 9 board meeting and said the problem was rectified within two hours.
Masters said in his report that he was told it was Iranian hackers, but that has not been confirmed.
“We simply don’t know when it happened or who did it,” Pixley General Manager Alex Peltzer wrote in an email after the meeting. “But it was clear that someone had gotten access and jumbled the programming necessary for the gates to the Pixley main turnout off of Deer Creek to operate in automatic mode.”
An investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation is ongoing. A phone call to the FBI’s Sacramento Press Office was not returned by deadline.
“We really don’t have any details from them by this point, and probably won’t ever get anything definitive, so our focus is on making the system more secure,” Peltzer said.
Peltzer said no landowners were denied water or had their water delivery delayed. Programming was restored a couple of days later, and the gates have been operating as intended.
“Remote access security has been increased, and we don’t anticipate a repeat event,” Peltzer said.
This incident comes on the heels of an Iranian hacker group attempting to gain access to California Water Service’s operational systems in Bakersfield, Visalia and Chico. The breach surfaced June 11 and was limited to one customer account and an external GPS website.
CaWater spokeswoman Yvonne Kingman wrote in an email to SJV Water that the utility immediately activated its cybersecurity response plan using Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in these types of threats.
Pelzter said water agencies and associations such as the Alliance of California Water Agencies (ACWA) are alerted to such incidents.
Johnny Amaral, chief executive officer of Friant Water Authority, which operates the Friant-Kern and Madera canals on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, said Friant has “protocols and procedures in place that we follow and redundancies built into our system to operate the facility in the event of an outage of any kind,” he wrote in a text message.
While the Friant-Kern Canal is an automated system, the authority maintains full capability of operating it manually in case of an outage.
The Pixley hack is both surprising and concerning, said Eric R. Quinley, general manager of Delano-Earlimart Irrigation District.
He declined to discuss details of Delano-Earlimart’s infrastructure operations and security.
“You never tell the adversary what you’re ready for.”
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