A cyber attack shut down a small British power plant for four days in July. Hackers affiliated with the Iranian regime were responsible, according to the Telegraph. Tony Diver, Rozina Sabur and Matt Oliver broke the story on Saturday. It is thought to be the first time hackers linked to Tehran have closed such a facility in the UK, they wrote.

They described it as the most successful attack of its kind. What the government has confirmed A British government spokesperson confirmed the incident to The Register on Monday. “This story refers to an incident impacting a small-scale energy generator, and at no point was there a risk to the wider energy system,” the spokesperson said.

“The UK has a highly resilient energy system. We work closely with the energy sector to protect infrastructure and ensure the highest security standards.” Michael Shanks, the UK energy minister, posted about the attack on X. His department briefed energy chief executives afterwards, he said, and shared advice on the steps companies should take.

The UK has not blamed anyone The government has not formally attributed the attack. That applies to Iran and to any other government or hacking group, The Register reported. Officials declined to identify the power station, citing security concerns.

The National Cyber Security Centre declined to comment. The NCSC sits under GCHQ and handles attacks on critical infrastructure. It does not routinely acknowledge individual incidents. The plant was small This was not an attack on an essential service such as a large power station, Tom Symonds reported for the BBC.

The UK network includes a number of smaller gas generators. They provide short-term power when needed. The Financial Times described the site as a peaker plant. Britain has dozens of them, according to the Telegraph. Many are gas-fired and run for only a few hours a week, for example when wind speeds are low.

A government source told the Telegraph the site sits well below the level at which operators must legally report cyber activity. “It’s a very small-scale site, less than a rounding error compared to grid capacity,” the source said. American water systems were hit at the same time The outage coincided with a series of attacks on US water infrastructure, the Telegraph reported.

Those attacks reached 12 states and caused concern in the White House. Dozens of wastewater treatment plants were affected. The intrusions caused flooding and a loss of pressure from taps. Some authorities told customers to boil water before drinking it.

The first reports emerged in Minnesota on 26 July. Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota and New Jersey followed. The Register put the Minnesota figure at more than 30 facilities, with similar intrusions later reported in at least 11 other states. CNBC reported that the FBI warned about attacks in at least seven states.

CISA, the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency blamed Iran, CNBC said. How the American attacks worked Most or all of the US utility attacks involved internet-connected programmable logic controllers, The Register reported. Those are the small computers that operate physical equipment such as pumps and valves.

Five federal agencies issued a warning last week. Attackers are now using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 controllers, they said, at water, manufacturing and energy sites. “This is not a theoretical risk, it is an active threat,” the agencies said.

“This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs,” Cynthia Kaiser told The Register. Kaiser is a former FBI cyber analyst, now at the Halcyon Ransomware Research Center. What Britain had been told to expect The intelligence and security committee oversees Britain’s spy agencies.

It reported last year that an Iranian cyber attack on British infrastructure was “unlikely”, according to the Telegraph. The same committee called cyber warfare a “significant area of asymmetric strength” for Iran. Tehran spends tens of millions of dollars on hacking groups, it said, each containing hundreds of people.

A Cabinet Office risk assessment published last month put the chance of a serious and successful attack on domestic infrastructure at 5% to 25%. It also warned that “AI can automate the process of launching cyber attacks, making them faster, more efficient and lower the barrier for entry”.

How often this happens Richard Horne runs the NCSC. He said in June that the agency had dealt with more than 200 attacks on critical national infrastructure in the previous year. Horne has also warned that the NCSC now handles at least four nationally significant attacks a week, Cyber Security News reported.

That number could rise sharply if Britain becomes more entangled in the Iran conflict, he said. The NCSC told British organisations in March to review their security in light of the Middle East conflict. The wider campaign Iran has stepped up attacks on Western countries since the US and Israel began air strikes in February, according to the Telegraph.

Germany, Poland, Finland, Belgium and Albania have all reported suspected Iranian attacks. The US Department of Justice charged 17 Iranians on 18 August, CNBC reported. The department called it a massive cyber theft campaign on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Israel’s national cyber chief said in June that Iranian attacks on the country had tripled in a year. What hackers have done in Britain before Foreign attacks have brought down NHS systems, schools and manufacturing lines, the Telegraph reported. Jaguar Land Rover was among them.

Hackers have also taken retail customer data and voter records from the Electoral Commission. Russian hackers were behind the Jaguar Land Rover attack, which cost the British economy $2.5bn. No hacker had brought a British power plant to a standstill before, according to the Telegraph.

AI and the attack toolkit The federal warning about AI-written exploit code follows other cases this year. Hackers mass-exploited two WordPress flaws in July after AI found the way in. Greg Brockman said this month that OpenAI had underestimated its own models on cyber capability.

Defence has become its own market. SoftBank and OpenAI launched a patching service for Japanese critical infrastructure in June. What is still unknown Neither the government nor the NCSC has said which plant was affected. Neither has said how the attackers got in.

Nobody has said whether the intrusion connects to the American water incidents. No formal attribution has been made. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero says it is updating its cyber security regulations. A new energy resilience strategy is due later this year, the BBC reported.

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Occupying Israeli army attacks water treatment facility in Gaza (machine-translated headline from a Turkish-language source)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a new initiative, "Operation Economic Outcast," that would impose expanded secondary sanctions on foreign entities conducting business with Iran, particularly in sectors such as digital assets, technology, and shipping.

U.S. officials described the measures as a primary pressure tool during the current diplomatic standstill, with Bessent stating that the administration lacks a specific compliance deadline and emphasized that no country, including China, would be exempt from the sanctions.

Pouyanne said TotalEnergies was benefiting from the sharp discounts offered by Middle Eastern crude producers, with oil being sold at $50-$60 a barrel, significantly below Brent crude prices, which were trading above $90 a barrel on Monday. The discounts were helping offset the sharply higher cost of transporting cargoes through the Strait of Hormuz, he said.

Also read: Fewer than 20 ships cross Strait of Hormuz over weekend as US-Iran blockades choke key oil route The additional freight costs for a supertanker are almost about $10 a barrel, he said. “Crude oil is sold to you at $50, $60 per barrel, not the Brent price, because the producers are desperate to push their oil into the market,” Pouyanne said.

The French petrochem giant is one of the largest traders of oil from Iraq and Qatar, two nations that have continued to move barrels through Hormuz in recent weeks, TotalEnergies boss added. A growing number of producers are moving cargoes through the critical waterway, which accounted for about a fifth of global oil flows before the Iran war.

These shipments have helped keep global oil prices from rising sharply beyond $100 a barrel, while also creating lucrative trading opportunities for shipowners and intermediaries. While some cargoes are transported directly to refineries worldwide, others are first loaded onto vessels in the Gulf of Oman before being shipped to their final destinations.

Pouyanne said the crude and fuel markets are increasingly diverging. Crude markets remain bearish, partly due to continued flows through the Strait of Hormuz, while fuel markets remain tight. Prices of products such as gasoline and diesel have risen following Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries, while the predominance of crude shipments through Hormuz has further constrained fuel supplies.

Also read: Iran threatens 45 tankers with fines, confiscation in Hormuz escalation However, he said the economics were far less favourable for refined petroleum products. Smaller product tankers meant that transportation costs could add as much as $50 a barrel, making shipments commercially unviable.

As a result, refined products such as gasoline and diesel are largely not being transported through the Strait of Hormuz, creating supply shortages and contributing to the divergence between crude and refined fuel markets, Pouyanne said. Despite the profitability of moving crude through the strait, TotalEnergies continues to pursue alternative export routes from the Middle East.

The company plans to become a partner in a proposed pipeline linking Baghdad to Syria and also intends to invest in expanding pipeline infrastructure in the UAE, Pouyanne said. He said TotalEnergies would invest in doubling the capacity of the Fujairah pipeline, which connects Abu Dhabi's oil fields to the UAE's eastern coast, allowing crude exports to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

The existing Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, also known as the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, has a capacity of up to 1.8 million barrels per day and has become increasingly important as the UAE seeks to maximise oil exports from the Gulf of Oman coast. The UAE aims to double this export capacity by next year.

Also read: Strikes in the Gulf changing rules behind India’s big-money bets Iran threatens tankers with fines, confiscationThe Iranian authorities blacklisted 45 tankers that had broken its rules for crossing the Strait of Hormuz, and would take action against any vessels transferring loads with them, escalating its threats over the key waterway six months into the war.

The named vessels could be fined, detained and have their cargoes confiscated, according to an X post from the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a new body set up by Iran to manage the strait. The restricted list of vessels includes very large crude carriers, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tankers, and clean product vessels, among others.