Evening Edition: Iranian Hackers Increase Attacks Against U.S. Infrastructure

I'm Trey Gowdy.

I'm Shannon Brehm.

I'm Stuart Vaughny, and this is The Fox News rundown.

Thursday, September 3, 2026, I'm Evan Brown.

Iran threatens US infrastructure not by missile

but by the internet.

And they mean to do it.

These guys are bad guys.

They really do want to hurt us.

And they do things that show us that every day.

The Iranians have successfully

had locations in the United Kingdom,

as well as the United States.

Iranians have succeeded in accessing locations.

We would have preferred them not access.

Their tempo is increasing.

This is The Fox News rundown evening edition.

The Trump administration is now warning

that hackers working for or with the Islamic Republic of Iran

are now threatening a wide-scale cyber attack

on US infrastructure.

The hacker group is identified as APT Iran.

And they've been making their intent

known via social media posts on platforms such as Telegram.

Infrastructure could mean anything

from electric utilities to water service,

to telecom, to roads and bridges.

And they've already had some successes

in targeting such things in Europe.

So is the US infrastructure protected?

Our critical infrastructure has asymmetric vulnerability

because America has the most advanced infrastructure.

John Coffranchesco is the CEO and founder

of American AI logistics.

We have automated so many of our systems.

And those automations allow us to do really great things, right?

It keeps our costs down.

It allows us to be greener.

But it comes with this downside.

That if you automate, you use computers,

you connect to the internet.

That creates a vector for exposure.

And it's a unique vector because you have to defend it.

Whereas other countries who still do things by hand,

take China that doesn't care so much about being green,

that doesn't do things as automated as we do it,

they have people to turn the pumps.

We have machines.

So it creates a vulnerability for us,

but that vulnerability is the expense we pay

for all the good stuff that comes with it.

You talk about using this technology,

the way that we do and how advanced it is.

But did anyone ever think at the beginning

when we started automating and started using these

call it smart devices, if you will,

to manage everything from our public infrastructure

to the locks on our doors and our homes

that we would be making ourselves vulnerable here?

So I think there's a sort of a trailing situation here

where people initially created these tools

and they immediately thought about what could go wrong here,

but they didn't immediately work to secure those things.

Because they didn't understand how quickly

the bad guys would sort it out.

And if you actually go back to the 80s, right,

there were great movies about starting nuclear wars

with Macbooks and Dawson computers and things, right?

That's so they absolutely thought about it,

but the security, although it was identified as a need,

it wasn't invested into initially.

But I can say over the last two presidential administrations,

so Trump 45 and Biden, the United States

and the West fret large, have invested tremendous amounts

of money and effort and have materially changed

our security posture.

So America is not perfect, our security is not perfect,

but it is tremendous and it is the best on earth.

How do we secure these things?

It's, you know, we talk about every person I know

has some kind of different, let's say, antivirus software.

And they insist the one that they have is the best.

But how do we, you know, again, that's that's small potatoes,

right, it's a personal computer, it's a personal device.

Obviously for large corporations,

there's much more invested in this.

But how do we secure, again, you know,

let's just say it's the water infrastructure.

There's a dam that holds back water that would flood a city.

You know, it lets out water every once in a while

to keep the pressure off the dam.

But what stops a cyber terrorist

from just flooding the place?

How do we work against something like that?

Well, as it turns out, we secure our critical infrastructure

very similarly to how you secure your house.

And actually the easiest things you do

matter the most in a lot of ways.

So I bet you lock your front door.

And that lock on your front door, right?

Evan, that's not going to stop a criminal from breaking a window,

right?

So if they really want to come in the house,

they can still come in the house.

But if you're concerned more about your safety,

well, then you add an alarm system, right?

You're still secured, you buy a firearm.

If you're still concerned, you might live in a gated neighborhood.

If you're still concerned, you might add a security guard.

We do the exact same thing in our cyber posture.

So we do those little things, add password controls,

add antivirus.

Actually, that is the number one vector of attack today.

Somebody sending an email and a goof clicking it.

We start doing those things first,

and then we add layered security.

And that layered security is coordinated against the risk.

So we invest much heavier, much more with people and technology

in the spaces that can have really bad outcomes if they weren't defended.

And we still invest, but we're less focused on things

that don't matter quite so much.

And then that is sort of strategically how we do it.

These cyber, I call them cyber terrorists,

but whether they're acting on their own

or they're acting on behalf of a nation state, in this case,

you run, how good are they at this?

How far ahead of them are we staying?

Or is it still like a neck and neck type of race

to make sure that they don't infiltrate our connected properties

that could put us at risk?

Today we're ahead in the race because we've invested a lot

over the last couple of administrations.

But that race is never ending.

And the thing that people have to understand,

and I think this gets lost in the politics,

these guys are bad guys.

They really do want to hurt us.

And they do things that show us that every day.

Just over the last 90 days or so,

the Israelis are tracking more than 4,000 attacks

on their infrastructure.

The Iranians have successfully hit locations

of the United Kingdom as well as the United States.

And these were not small efforts.

I mean, the Iranians have succeeded in accessing locations.

We would have preferred them not access.

Their tempo is increasing.

They're getting the attention.

But despite the attacks, despite their tempo increasing,

they haven't succeeded.

There hasn't been a cascade of failures.

There hasn't been major outages.

There hasn't been water contamination.

That is because the investment we've made over the last decade

or so.

And it is because the quality of expertise we have today

is just an order of magnitude better than it was

a couple of decades ago.

We really have done the work.

And now we're getting a positive result.

Despite the fact these bad guys are getting after us.

We are speaking with John Cofrancisco.

He's the CEO and founder of American AI Logistics.

We are talking about recent cyber threats

made against US infrastructure by hackers

backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

On the Fox News rundown evening edition,

please like, subscribe, share this podcast.

We'll have more straight ahead.

I tend to think that if a problem should happen,

it may have been because of a human error.

You mentioned someone getting a strange email

and clicking the link.

What do we as individuals have to be aware of

that could possibly cause a bigger problem?

I mean, I would imagine me checking my own personal email

might not affect, let's say, a power plant.

But if I'm an employee of that power plant

checking my personal email at work, we have a problem, right?

Absolutely.

And the bad guys have learned that in order

to really have a successful attack,

they often need to move horizontally across the network,

but also vertically through a network.

So having if you were a power plant worker,

they might attack your home computer,

hoping to get some malicious code onto a device

that you would bring into work, right?

Now they've jumped, they've jumped defense,

and now they might try to move laterally through that network.

So maybe you're not that senior,

but your boss is very senior,

your peer is very senior from a technical perspective

and they might try to access their material

through yourself and then move vertically through that

and work attacking different components of the system.

So you might start with something like payroll

and then work your way into something scary

like the nuclear control rods.

But I have to put this in context.

We have so many protections in place today.

They are robust.

We have invested tremendously.

If you'd talked to me about this 15 years ago,

it would have been a much different story.

The one thing I will caution you on is

that these guys are really creative.

It would be great if the bad guys were like

Boris and Natasha, Rocky, Polo, right?

They were just dumb.

These guys aren't dumb.

And these guys aren't cartoon villains

that don't really want to hurt you.

They want to hurt us.

These are evil, evil people.

They have to be stood up to it.

They have to be stopped.

We are succeeding today.

The race has not stopped.

It's more than just attacking the infrastructure.

I mean, there are people,

there are these types of gangs out there

and it could be the enemy, so to speak,

in this case, the Iranian regime

that want to attack you personally.

If they can get a hold of your banking information,

for instance, there are so many different,

I mean, I get text messages all the time on my phone

that purport to be something.

I can just smell it.

I can just tell it's not real.

I delete them.

But sooner or later, they catch someone in this, don't they?

Absolutely.

I mean, and that's why the average is, yeah.

Exactly.

They get the law of big numbers, right?

So when you're on the attack,

you only have to win once every million tries.

When you're on defense, you have to win every time

or you lose.

So they have that big advantage over us.

But I really think it's worth just taking a look

at the nature of how the bad guys behave.

So in the United States, a member of our military

doesn't take an action without an order.

We have a really strong sense of control.

We really do follow the laws here.

That is not how the bad guy countries operate.

So particularly the Russians,

but this is true of the Iranians as well.

They have these semi-autonomous groups

that can behave without leadership direction

and they can do some very vicious things.

And provided they are moving in the general direction

that the leadership wants, it's basically approved.

So there's a high overlap between this sort of

gangsterism attack and the terrorism attack

or the nation state attack.

The Russians really pioneered this.

It is prolific in Eastern Europe.

It has grown in the Middle East, particularly Iran.

And it exists in other places, you know, China, et cetera.

But there is no doubt that if they could get to you

as a gangster, you know, they're happy to do that.

And if they can get to you as a nation state,

they're also happy to do that.

And this is, I've used the phrase a few times,

cyber terrorism, but this is terrorism.

It's the use of a type of violence

to try to push a change, isn't it?

Absolutely.

And I don't think you can talk about this,

Evan, without looking at the broader context of the war

and for all sorts of political reasons,

I don't know if we've gotten the most earnest perspective

out of this in most places.

This is arguably the most successful war in history.

We have annihilated Iran.

If you walk back the clock 10 months,

these guys had an incredible missile force.

They were building nuclear material, whistle material.

They had a material navy.

They had a real air force with frankly, American planes.

They had tens of thousands, if not 100,000,

plus missiles, and we'll look at them today.

They have no navy.

It's at the bottom of the ocean.

They have no functioning army.

They have zero air force.

They no longer have air defense over terrain.

Now, we have tragically lost 18 service members

and their sacrifice for our safety.

We should never forget it.

These people, we owe them, we owe their families.

I think about their families,

but there is no doubt that we have crushed the Iranians.

The only thing that we haven't succeeded in yet

is getting regime change.

And I don't know that that's possible

without the boots on the ground,

but we've had other wars,

where we've put boots on the ground.

I'll remind you of the first Gulf War,

where we didn't get regime change.

So we have achieved everything in this war

that we achieved in the first Gulf War

without having a single boot on the ground.

It is incredible.

Our military should be loud at for it.

And that's why we're seeing the increase in cyber attacks.

They don't have another way to get at us.

We've annihilated everything else.

So their optempo of striking at us through cyber

is going to continue to increase.

It's what they've got left.

John Co. Francesco, you are the founder

and the CEO of American AI Logistics.

Thank you so much for being with us on the Fox News rundown.

Thank you so much for having me.

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