By AJ Vicens
CAMP DAVID, Maryland/DETROIT, July 31 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters at Camp David on Friday that he does not think Iran is behind a cyberattack on Minnesota water systems, despite U.S. officials reportedly suspecting otherwise.
“We heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack, and they blame it on Iran. I don’t think so,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting. “I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent,” Trump said, calling out Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat.
Trump did not say where he thought the attacks may have originated. The White House press office declined to elaborate on who the president believes carried out the attacks and the state of Minnesota’s role in them.
Walz said in a post on his X social media account that Trump “knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too.” Walz added that Elon Musk’s DOGE effort “took an axe to CISA and left the U.S. exposed to cyberattacks,” and thanked experts in Minnesota who “were able to identify the vulnerability quickly and work with local communities to stop it.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) told Reuters earlier this week that it was coordinating with the EPA and other government and industry partners to understand the scope of the issue and provide support. The agency did not immediately respond to questions Friday about either Trump or Walz’s comments.
Trump’s claim is at odds with a memo cited by Wired on Thursday which said that the Minnesota Fusion Center, a state-level intelligence-sharing entity, found that the July 26 and 27 hacks were “aligned” with an allegedly Iran-linked cybersabotage campaign. The New York Times, which cited unnamed U.S. and state officials, said on Thursday that investigators believed the hacks were probably the work of Tehran.
Cybersecurity experts and Minnesota’s state IT agency told Reuters this week that the attacks share characteristics with hacking efforts targeting key water facility equipment that seven U.S. government agencies, including the FBI, NSA, EPA, and CISA, linked to Iranian-affiliated hackers in a July 22 report. The FBI said in an advisory published on Thursday that it has received reports of similar incidents in at least seven states that have, in some cases, “degraded water operations” since July 27.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment ON Friday.
Trump has previously politicized major cyber incidents, including when in 2016 he urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, or when he downplayed Russian hacking efforts in the 2016 elections and mused that while it could be Russia or China, “it could also be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?”
(Reporting by AJ Vicens in Detroit; Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Bo Erickson and Raphael Satter; Editing by Caitlin Webber, Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci )
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