Early this morning a bulldozer from a construction site near the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, CA was sighted leaving the site without a visible operator present. It traversed 1.5 miles of city streets to the local office of Rep. Harvey Milk (D,CA) and crashed into the office. No one was hurt, but the first-floor office was destroyed and the remainder of the building was evacuated pending a building safety inspection.
James Portman, spokesman for Dillyboys Construction, confirmed that an autonomous earthmover was missing from their construction site. “The vehicle number provided to us by the police department is consistent with the vehicle missing from our site,” Portman told reporters, “But we have not had a chance to physically confirm that the machine is ours.”
The machine, still inside the congressional office, has been identified as a RoboKonstruk R9 autonomous bulldozer. RoboKonstruk is a division of the German Robotron Automation, an industrial control system giant. That division was formed three years ago to provide industrial automation systems for the construction industry.
W.E. Ulbricht, spokesman for RoboKonstruk, confirmed to this reporter that the company’s R9 bulldozer was capable of operating without an operator being on the vehicle, or even present on the work site. “Our machines are designed to be used in either a tele-operational mode where the operator directly controls the machine from a remote console,” Ulbricht said, “Or in a preprogramed mode where a series of operations and movements are designated in advance.”
General Buck Turgidson, Director of the Critical Infrastructure Security Operations Center (CI-SOC), in a brief statement released by the CI-SOC, said that the Center has no information about the cybersecurity status of the RoboKonstruk equipment. “It is not something that has been called to our attention as a potential threat,” the statement reads; “Nor are we aware of any publicly released research on the subject. We are in touch with RoboKonstruk and will be working with them to look at the situation.”
A spokesperson for Rep. Milk told reporters that no one had been in the office when the incident occurred due to the early morning hour. “The Congressman has no relationship with Dillyboys and has no reason to suspect that they might have been responsible for the damage to our office. We will be working closely with investigators to find out who is responsible for this attack.”
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