Nancy Bartels of Control magazine and ControlGlobal.com hijacking Joe's blog here. This story would be funny if it wasn't so scary. Wired magazine has broken the real story (or the latest iteration of the real story). The link is here. So it wasn't evil hackers from Russia after all. From the sound of it, more like a Keystone Cops fire drill. Nobody checked with anybody. Lots of people assumed things they shouldn't have assumed, and now it's somebody else's fault and we're into a finger-pointing marathon.
I would have thought the next step for DHS and the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center, would be to figure out how -- ahem -- mistakes were made. It would be nice to think they were working on making sure such errors never occur again and that when alerts are issued, they're accurate.
Silly me.
What is DHS and ISTIC worried about? Who spilled the beans to Joe Weiss. Like finding that out is going to help secure our water system infrastructure.
It smells to this layperson like the bureaucracy is in full CYA mode. If the public can be distracted from the issue of how DHS and ISTIC fumbled notification so badly, then nobody will be to blame, which is what's really important after all. Meanwhile, one of these days, there's going to be a really serious infrastructure attack, and nobody's going to pay attention because everyone is going to assume that it's another DHS screw-up.
Then heads really are going to have to roll, but by then it will be too late.
