India's largest platform and marketplace for GCCs & AI

Sign in

India's largest platform and marketplace for GCCs & AI
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

  • IoT devices at risk from Amnesia:33

      A new series of vulnerabilities dubbed Amnesia:33 puts millions of IoT devices at risk of being compromised. Security researchers from Forescout disclosed the 33 vulnerabilities today. The flaws are found in four open-source TCP/IP libraries used in the firmware of products from over 150 vendors. According to the researchers’ estimates, millions of consumer and […]

  • Future of Work 2.0: Reimagining Work in the Age of Contextual Generative AI

    Featured Article Author: Mahadevann Iyerr, MAAVRUS The way we work is changing a lot, and it’s more than just using new technology. As technology improves quickly and more data is created, businesses need to rethink how they do things to stay successful. This change is happening because of AI, the huge amount of data we […]

  • Inventory Redeployment through Optimized and Automated Recommendations

    Featured Article: Author: Shrinath Bhat, Senior Data Scientist, AB InBev Supply Chain of Future (SCoF) Analytics team’s vision, which is a part of Growth Analytics Centre (GAC): the global analytics hub for Ab-InBev, is to create value via adoption of cutting-edge practices in Supply Chain domain with a series of digital transformations and advanced analytics […]

  • Give AI a ‘positive’ spin: Google tells its scientists

    Google has reportedly been telling its scientists to give AI a “positive” spin in research papers. Documents obtained by Reuters suggest that, in at least three cases, Google’s researchers were requested to refrain from being critical of AI technology. A “sensitive topics” review was established by Google earlier this year to catch papers which cast a negative […]