Iran-linked hackers blamed for taking down U.K. power plant for first time, reports say - CBS News

Iranian-affiliated hackers temporarily took a U.K. power plant offline in July 2026, according to reports from The Telegraph and Financial Times, believed to be the first such shutdown of this kind of facility in the country.
The U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre neither confirmed nor denied the attack when contacted by CBS News.
The breach occurred the same month Iranian-linked hackers are believed to have targeted water systems in about a dozen U.S. states—including New Jersey, Minnesota, Georgia and South Dakota—causing lockouts, pressure loss and flooding.
Both attacks targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs), the automated "brains" of industrial systems used across energy, water, manufacturing, hospitals, chemical plants, elevators, trains, prison gates, traffic lights and fire suppression systems.
Estimates of PLCs in use worldwide range from roughly 12 million to more than 70 million; the first model dates to the late 1960s, and many older units still running were never built with modern cybersecurity in mind.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says the intrusions rely on simple methods—scanning for exposed devices and exploiting unchanged default passwords—rather than advanced exploits, and notes that securing this equipment has largely fallen to individual plant operators.