According to The Wall Street Journal, a German federal agency has acknowledged in a report Wednesday that a cyberattack caused physical damage to an iron plant in the country. It was a rare admission by a government tying a cyber action to actual physical destruction.
The attackers gained access to an unnamed plant’s office network through a targeted malicious email and were ultimately able to cross over into the production network. The plant’s control systems were breached which “resulted in an incident where a furnace could not be shut down in the regular way and the furnace was in an undefined condition which resulted in massive damage to the whole system,” according to the report, called the IT Security Situation in Germany in 2014.
The report is created annually by Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security. The agency, known as Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik or BSI, is in charge of managing computer and communication security for the German government including critical infrastructure. The agency did not respond to a request for additional information about the company’s name or the extent of the damage.
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