Tag Archive for: City’s

Hacker tried to poison Florida city’s water supply — GCN

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water treatment plant (People Image Studio/Shutterstock.com)

Hacker tried to poison Florida city’s water supply

  • By Susan Miller
  • Feb 09, 2021

As an employee at a water treatment plant watched, a hacker took control of his computer and changed chemical controls to dump lye into the drinking water of Oldsmar, Fla., a city of 15,000 near Tampa.

At about 8 a.m. on Feb. 5, a worker at the Oldsmar water treatment plant noticed that his computer was being remotely accessed by TeamViewer, a popular desktop control application that allows IT staff and supervisors to monitor operations and troubleshoot enterprise computers in remote locations. The worker “didn’t think much of it,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said at a Feb. 8 news conference, because such remote access was not unusual.

The intruder returned later that same day, moving the employee’s mouse to open functions that control water treatment protocols, including one that adjusts the amount of sodium hydroxide, or lye, in the water. The hacker changed that level from about 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, potentially endangering Oldsmar residents. Fortunately, the operator who was watching the intruder’s movements immediately reduced the chemical to the appropriate level and notified a supervisor.

Such attacks on utility control systems are not unusual, according to Lesley Carhart, a principal threat analyst at Dragos, an industrial control system security firm. Carhart told Wired that even unsophisticated hackers can find thousands of connected systems with tools like Shodan, a search engine that lets users find specific types of internet-connected devices.

According to Carhart, water treatment and sewage plants are vulnerable targets, especially during the pandemic when some workers are remote and IT staff are under-resourced. It’s usually the complexity and redundancies built into industrial control systems that prevent hackers from causing serious consequences, she said.

Oldsmar’s water treatment plant has several redundancies in place to catch unexpected changes.

“If you change the…

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Someone tried to poison Florida city’s water supply during hack, sheriff says

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TAMPA, Fla. — Local and federal authorities are investigating after an attempt Friday to poison the city of Oldsmar’s water supply, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.



a couple of people that are standing in a room: Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri speaks at a press conference Monday, Feb. 8, 2021, along with Oldsmar Mayor Eric Seidel, left.

© Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office/TNS
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri speaks at a press conference Monday, Feb. 8, 2021, along with Oldsmar Mayor Eric Seidel, left.

Someone remotely accessed a computer for the city’s water treatment system and briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, by a factor of more than 100, Gualtieri said at a news conference Monday. The chemical is used in small amounts to control the acidity of water but it’s also a corrosive compound commonly found in household cleaning supplies such as liquid drain cleaners.

The city’s water supply was not affected. A supervisor working remotely saw the concentration being changed on his computer screen and immediately reverted it, Gualtieri said. City officials on Monday emphasized that several other safeguards are in place to prevent contaminated water from entering the water supply and said they’ve disabled the remote-access system used in the attack.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office is investigating, along with the FBI and the Secret Service, Gualtieri said.

Nobody has been arrested, Gualtieri said, though investigators have some leads. They do not know why the city of Oldsmar was targeted, he said. He added that other area municipalities have been alerted to the attack and encouraged to inspect the safeguards to their water treatment systems and other infrastructure.

Though some cities obtain water through Pinellas County, Oldsmar provides water directly to its businesses and roughly 15,000 residents, Gualtieri said. The computer system at the water treatment plant was set up to allow authorized users to remotely access it for troubleshooting.

A plant operator was monitoring the system at about 8 a.m. EST Friday and noticed that someone briefly accessed it. He didn’t find this unusual, Gualtieri said, because his supervisor remotely accessed the system regularly.

But at about 1:30 p.m. the same day, Gualtieri said, someone accessed the system again. This time, he said, the…

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Verizon calls New York City’s report on FiOS failure a ‘union tactic’

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The office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio released results of a recent audit of Verizon’s FiOS deployment in the city today, declaring that “Verizon substantially failed to meet its commitment to the people of New York City.”

The report, released by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) and available in PDF here, charges Verizon with several violations of its 2008 agreement to offer FiOS to all city residents by 2014, claiming the company “has not run fiber throughout enough of the City’s residential neighborhoods to deliver on its commitments.” Earlier this week, a Wall Street Journal report leaked details from the audit: that more than 40,000 requests for service from residences that had not been wired for FiOS remained unfulfilled, and that 75% of those requests had gone unaddressed for more than a year.

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