Remote Access Leads To FL Water Supply Tampering
A quick thinking worker watched and quickly fixed an attack as a hacker using a Florida water treatment plant’s remote access capabilities broke in Friday and increased the amount of sodium hydroxide, or lye, to extremely dangerous levels.
In these times of increased work from home, questions remain as to how secure are company’s remote access capabilities, and how vigilant are those providers in seeing what is going on? In this case, it appears the water company’s remote access was not secure, but worker vigilance was on target.
The investigation into the hack is continuing after the attempted poisoning of the city of Oldsmar, Florida’s water supply, said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said. Someone remotely accessed a computer for the city’s water treatment system and briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide by a factor of more than 100, Gualtieri said at a news conference.