Itron, the Washington-based utility technology company that manages 112 million energy and water meter endpoints across 7,700 customers in 100 countries, disclosed a cyberattack in an SEC 8-K filing April 24. An unauthorized third party reached parts of Itron's corporate IT network on April 13. Itron says it has expelled the attackers and seen no follow-up activity, and that customer-hosted environments (the actual utility infrastructure) were untouched. No ransomware group has claimed the attack. The incident is significant because Itron sits in the middle of US critical infrastructure - meter data, billing, and grid telemetry pass through its software at thousands of utilities.
Kaspersky has documented a previously undocumented data wiper, dubbed Lotus Wiper, used in destructive attacks on the Venezuelan energy and utilities sector at the end of 2025 and into 2026. The malware has no ransom note, no payment instructions, and no recovery mechanism - this is pure destruction, consistent with state-aligned or geopolitically-motivated sabotage rather than cybercrime. The attack begins with two batch scripts that prepare the environment: one checks for a NETLOGON share (the Active Directory login-scripts share) to confirm the machine is domain-joined, then fetches a remote XML file and runs a second script. The second script disables cached logins, logs off active sessions, kills network interfaces, runs 'diskpart clean all' to wipe all logical drives, uses robocopy to recursively overwrite or delete folders, and uses fsutil to fill remaining free space. Once the environment is prepped, the Lotus Wiper binary deletes restore points, zeros out physical sectors, clears NTFS journal USN records, and erases every file on every mounted volume. Kaspersky notes one script tries to stop the Windows UI0Detect service, a feature removed after Windows 10 version 1803 - meaning the attackers knew they would hit legacy Windows systems and had deep prior knowledge of the target environment, implying long-running domain compromise before the destructive payload fired. The sample was uploaded to a public malware-sharing platform from Venezuela in mid-December 2025, weeks before the U.S. military action in the country in early January 2026.
A joint FBI/CISA advisory warns that Iranian-affiliated APT actors are actively targeting internet-exposed Rockwell Automation and Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers across US critical infrastructure - specifically Government Services, Water and Wastewater Systems, and Energy sectors. The attacks have caused financial losses and operational disruptions since March 2026, with the FBI confirming attackers extracted PLC project files and manipulated data displayed on HMI and SCADA systems. The escalation is linked to ongoing hostilities between Iran, the US, and Israel.
TrustStrike Labs