Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at ThycoticCentrify, told IT Pro that this highlights and reminds us how bad password hygiene is getting and how important it is for organizations to priorities password security and management. The amount of chemicals it would take to cause harm to people.the numbers are astronomical.” According to an advisory from the state of Massachusetts, employees with the Oldsmar facility used a computer running Windows 7 to remotely access plant. “For a large impact, there has to be a large change in the chemicals in the system. “It takes a lot to influence a water supply chain,” he said. “No one tried to poison any of our water,” he told the newspaper. "No failures were reported as a result of this incident, and no individuals in the city reported illness from water-related failures," the report said.Īccording to some reports, the hacker "tried to poison" the area's water, but Michael Sena, executive director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, told the San Francisco Chronicle there was no attempt to poison the water supply. Once plant staff noticed the breach, it reinstalled all the deleted programs and reset all employee passwords. Congress recently gave CISA legal authority to force internet providers to turn over the identities of organizations that it or other government agencies see are being targeted by hackers.The breach went undetected until the next day. Most shocking, more than 80 percent of the major vulnerabilities that the surveyed facilities had were software flaws discovered before 2017, indicating a rampant problem of employees not updating their software. As many as 1 in 10 water and wastewater plants had recently found a critical cybersecurity vulnerability. Of those that do, an internal CISA survey conducted earlier this year, the results of which she shared with NBC, found dour results. Only a tiny fraction of the country's water facilities choose to use CISA's services - "several hundred" out of more than the 50,000 across the U.S., Anne Cutler, a spokesperson for the agency, said. But it doesn't regulate the sector and is largely confined to giving advice and assistance to organizations that ask for it. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal government's primary cybersecurity defense agency, is tasked with helping secure the country's infrastructure, including water. The former employee has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer didn't respond to a request for comment. A night shift worker who had worked at the Post Rock Rural Water District logged into a remote online control system and tried to shut down the plant's cleaning and disinfecting operations in 2019, the Department of Justice said. attorney in Kansas indicted a former employee of a tiny water treatment plant in Ellsworth County over an incident that had happened two years earlier. That means hacks can take years to come to light, if they do at all. 2021 Breached water plant employees used the same TeamViewer password and no firewall The Florida water treatment facility whose computer system experienced. An official cybersecurity advisory about the incident from the state of Massachusetts (via Ars Technica) explains that the SCADA control system was accessed via TeamViewer, the kind of remote. In most cases, it's up to individual water plants to protect themselves, and even if they're aware they've been hacked - a big if - they might not be inclined to tell the federal government, much less their customers. While individual facilities can ask the federal government for help to protect themselves, few do. government has said it has no plans for one. There has never been a nationwide cybersecurity audit of water treatment facilities, and the U.S. Water plant employees used same teamviewer Offline Once Colonial Pipeline knew its IT operations were affected, it chose to proactively take its OT systems offline to prevent the attack from spreading. "You don't really have a good assessment of what's going on," he said. "It's really difficult to apply some kind of uniform cyber hygiene assessment, given the disparate size and capacity and technical capacity of all the water utilities," said Mike Keegan, an analyst at the National Rural Water Association, a trade group for the sector. Whether hacks on water plants have recently become more common or just more visible is impossible to tell, because there is no comprehensive federal or industry accounting of water treatment plants' security. In another previously unreported hack, the Camrosa Water District in Southern California was infected with ransomware last summer. In Pennsylvania, a state water warning system has reportedly alerted its members to two recent hacks at water plants in the state. But a number of facilities have been hacked in the past year, though most draw little attention. To date, a true catastrophe - where a hacker was able to poison a population's drinking water, causing mass sickness or even death - has not happened.
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