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

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1:00I'm Shannon Bream. I'm Stuart Vony and this is the Fox News rundown. Thursday, September 3rd, 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 hit 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. For the first time ever, Yamavar Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving away a new Rolex watch for every club Serrano card deer. Play with your club Serrano card and on September 20th, you could be one of five winners of a Rolex watch. Plus, all winners will advance to the finale at Palm's Casino Resort Las Vegas for a chance to take home a rarity.

2:03The second Mustang Dark Horse ever produced on September 26th, two properties, six winners, only at Yamavar Resort and Casino, your California to Vegas connection. Details at Yamavar.com must be 21 or older to enter participate. Please gamble responsibly. 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.

3:04We 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.

4:06So 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, there were great movies about starting nuclear wars with Macbooks and you know, doggies, 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, you know, over the last two presidential administrations, so Trump 45 and Biden, the United States and the West Ritlarge, 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,

5:11antivirus software. They insist the one that they have is the best, but how do we, you know, but 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, 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

6:16concerned, 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 into 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's that is sort of strategically how we do it. These cyber, I call them cyber terrorists, but whether they're, you know, acting on their own, or they're acting on behalf of a nation state, in this case, Iran, 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, you know, our connected properties that could put us at risk?

7:22Today we're ahead in the race because we've invested a lot over the last couple 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. You know, 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

8:24of magnitude better than it was a couple 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. Yama va resort and casino. Your California to Vegas connection details at Yama va.com must be 21 or older to enter participate. Please gamble responsibly. I tend to think that if a problem should

9:25happen, 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 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, Evan, 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 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, your, your pure is very senior from a technical perspective, and they might try to access their material through yourself and then move vertically through that network, attacking different components

10:29of the system. So, you might start with something like payroll and then work your way into, you know, something scary like the nuclear control rods, but, 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 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 and Rocky Bowling go 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. 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, it could be the, you know, 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, your banking information, you know,

11:30for instance, you know, there are so many different, I mean, I get text messages all the time on my phone that, 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, yeah, you know, exactly. They get the law big numbers, right? So when you're on the attack, you only have to win, you know, 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, you know, 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

12:30direction 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, China, etc. But there is no doubt that if they could get to you as a gangster, 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 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 then 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

13:35missile force. They were building nuclear material, Fissel material. They had a material navy. They had a real air force with frankly American planes. They had tens of thousands, if not a hundred thousand 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 for it. And

14:38that'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 Coffin Chesco, 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. You've been listening to the Fox News rundown. And now stay up to date by subscribing to this podcast at FoxNewsPodcasts.com. Listen to Add Free on Fox News Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts. And, prime members can listen to the show Add Free on Amazon Music. And for up to the minute news, go to FoxNews.com. Taboos with Ali Wang on August 28th and 29th. Enjoy Ralph Barbosa's dry humor on September 18th and 19th. And don't miss Nikki Glazers on a apologetic comedy November 19th.

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