(Bloomberg) — The 20-foot Bowman Avenue Dam on the outskirts of Rye, New York, is so inconsequential that many residents of the affluent commuter town didn't even know it existed. But Iranian hackers did.
"It's frightening," Marilyn Weissman, the manager at Dusty Rose, a sportswear and lingerie store at the Rye Ridge Shopping Center, said when told that there's a dam in the woods nearby — and that the U.S. Justice Department says it was attacked by hackers tied to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. "You don't know what will happen."
A U.S. indictment unsealed last week accused a hacker based in Iran of gaining remote access to a computer controlling the flood-control structure for about three weeks beginning in 2013, while six other Iranians attacked U.S. banks and companies. Justice Department officials say no damage was done to the dam, about 20 miles north of New York City, simply because it was closed for maintenance at the time.
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