Bad Password May Have Led to Pennsylvania Water System Hack

(TNS) — Federal and state security officials said a poor or even default password could be the weak link that enabled hackers to break into a Pittsburgh-area water system.

The Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa suffered the cyberattack on Saturday, with several media outlets displaying images of a screen from the authority equipment that claimed to target Israeli-made products.

In a Tuesday alert, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said the hackers, who some media outlets have identified as the pro-Iran group CyberAvengers, “likely accessed the affected device … by exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses, including poor password security and exposure to the internet.”

CISA is a federal agency that falls under the Department of Homeland Security.

The Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center shared CISA’s advisory Wednesday and reminded security experts “to ensure the default ‘1111’ password is not in use” on their networks, according to an email obtained by TribLive.

The center also recommended that systems’ “programmable logic controllers,” or PLCs, use multifactor authentication and update to the most current software.

No customers of Aliquippa’s service lost access to water due to the attack, said Robert Bible, general manager of the Aliquippa Municipal Authority, in an interview with TribLive news partner WTAE.

Bible said the hackers targeted a small substation in Racoon Township. They disabled a device that is used to automatically control water levels at the authority’s tanks, he said.

Bible did not return phone calls Wednesday to the municipal authority. Aliquippa Mayor Dwan B. Walker also could not be reached for comment.

CISA officials, in their Tuesday advisory, identified equipment hacked at the Pennsylvania utility as a “Unitronics Vision Series PLC with a Human Machine Interface (HMI).”

Unitronics, which is based in Israel and operates a U.S. office in Quincy, Mass., a Boston suburb, did not respond to numerous emails and phone calls this week seeking comment.

Pittsburgh-based Jewish security officials said they also have grappled with cybersecurity issues related to the…