India's largest platform and marketplace for GCC & AI leaders and professionals

Sign in

India's largest platform and marketplace for GCC & AI leaders and professionals
Become a Thought Leader
Become a 3AI Member

Sign in

3AI Digital Library

< Go Back

A hacker broke into a Florida Water Treatment Plant

3AI February 14, 2021

A hacker broke into a Florida water treatment plant and ordered it to increase the amount of lye to extremely dangerous levels, officials said.

.

A hacker broke into a Florida water treatment plant and ordered it to increase the amount of lye in the water to extremely dangerous levels, officials said Monday.

The plant operators noticed and remedied their systems before anyone was put in danger, but the event highlights the risks of internet-connected controls to civic infrastructure.

In a news conference Monday, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said that on Friday morning an unknown hacker broke into a program designed to help water treatment operators in Oldsmar troubleshoot problems with the computerized parts of their treatment systems. The program is intended to give full, remote access to a plant computer, but only by authorized users.

Later that afternoon, the system was breached again. A hacker, who authorities believe to be the same one from the initial breach, took control of the computer and changed the acceptable level of sodium hydroxide — better known as lye, the main ingredient in many household drain cleaners — from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million.

A water plant operator noticed immediately and corrected the change, Gualtieri said, adding that if the operator had missed it and the change didn’t trigger some of the plant’s alarms, the lye could have seeped into the water supply in 24 to 36 hours.

“Because the operator noticed the increase and lowered it right away, at no time was there a significant adverse effect on the water being treated,” Gualtieri said.

Gualtieri said that he had no idea where the hacker was operating from but that he is working with the FBI and the Secret Service to find out.

Al Braithwaite, Oldsmar’s city manager, said at the news conference that the system that enabled remote access to the plant’s computers had been disabled and that the city planned to find a replacement.

Picture from freepik.com

    3AI Trending Articles

  • MassMutual GCC to come up in Hyderabad

    With 300+ associates and leadership in all functional areas already on-board, MassMutual India is actively hiring for multiple roles in the areas of application development and support, cloud engineering, data science, and analytics, said a statement from the minister’s office. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, a US-based leading life insurer, Monday announced opening of a […]

  • Mitigating Bias in AI Systems

    Featured Article: Author: Kritika Saraswat & Sreedhar Sambamoorthi, AB InBev Twenty Years ago, science fiction stories were ripe with futuristic scenarios with cars driving themselves, computer writing stories and human-like holograms responding to any and every query that we had. These scenarios were considered a figment of good writer’s imagination and books and movies on […]

  • AI and Ethics – Modern AI Algorithms

    Featured Article: Author: Sameer Ranjan, CTO & Director – Data Science, Catenate Ethics has always been subjective and quite often changed based on the philosophy of nations or their leaders. It is often related to principles of morality and the set of beliefs that a group of people follows. In the 21st century, the narrative […]

  • New Customer Expectations Driving Digital Innovation

    Featured Article: Author: Nitin Srivastava, Director – Data & Analytics, Advance Auto Parts India To ride this tide of disruption, it is crucial to understand the pulse of customer behavior and demand and integrate it into a digital first approach. One of the key changes brought about by the COVID pandemic was the acceleration of […]