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Breached water plant employees used the same TeamViewer password and no firewall:
The Florida water treatment facility whose computer system experienced a potentially hazardous computer breach last week used an unsupported version of Windows with no firewall and shared the same TeamViewer password among its employees, government officials have reported.
After gaining remote access [...] the unknown intruder increased the amount of sodium hydroxide—a caustic chemical better known as lye—by a factor of 100. The tampering could have caused severe sickness or death had it not been for safeguards the city has in place.
According to an advisory from the state of Massachusetts, employees with the Oldsmar facility used a computer running Windows 7 to remotely access plant controls known as a SCADA—short for “supervisory control and data acquisition”—system. What’s more, the computer had no firewall installed and used a password that was shared among employees for remotely logging in to city systems with the TeamViewer application.
Massachusetts officials wrote:
The unidentified actors accessed the water treatment plant’s SCADA controls via remote access software, TeamViewer, which was installed on one of several computers the water treatment plant personnel used to conduct system status checks and to respond to alarms or any other issues that arose during the water treatment process. All computers used by water plant personnel were connected to the SCADA system and used the 32-bit version of the Windows 7 operating system. Further, all computers shared the same password for remote access and appeared to be connected directly to the Internet without any type of firewall protection installed.
[....] The revelations illustrate the lack of security rigor found inside many critical infrastructure environments.
It was a 32-bit computer; so they wisely had Windows 7 instead of XP.
See also:
recent SoylentNews article about this, attempt to poison the water supply of residents in Oldsmar, Forida.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday February 12 2021, @09:19AM (8 children)
Why does a water treatment plant need remote ops at all? Can be fixed with money and modest management (e.g. fix-it crew on site, or an on-call rota). May work cheaper than technical solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2021, @09:54AM (2 children)
Because MUH CORONA!!! You are not allowed to operate Water Treatment Console without 80 masks on, which makes it physically impossible to touch the controls, and the weight snaps your neck.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday February 12 2021, @03:47PM
You get a lot of your news in meme-form, dontcha.
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(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday February 12 2021, @06:00PM
No. Colleagues on operations at my work place are perfectly fine operating complex equipment despite corona virus. This is no excuse.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2021, @11:52AM (1 child)
lazyness, lack of awareness that the Net of Thousand Lies is a warzone (i doubt these people ever felt what a warzone really is, anyway) and always has been, desire to access data from anywhere, inability to construct a proper solution due to lack of: time, resources, clues, giving a fuck.
Lack of thinking it through, lack of modelling failure modes, a desire to just get it done.
Representation of nigh-infinitely complex and nonlinear field (INFOSEC) as having easy(!) simple(!!) technical solutions (!!!).
Same as any and every company where the compliance and liability and yearly bonus are the deciding factors, and not "will this garbage work?" or "is it even useful?".
These people usually have no interest in technological superiority.
Risk and Compliance say its ok - fuck you, ticket closed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2021, @02:40PM
> These people usually have no interest in technological superiority.
It's not in the budget. Make do with what you've got. Your record has been noted.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 12 2021, @01:26PM (1 child)
It was caught because an employee on site noticed the cursor moving itself on the screen.
Remote management is just "the modern way" which means that the on site employees can let someone who knows what they are actually doing do the changes themselves instead of playing the telephone game: Set pump 2 to 130 and valve 3 to 210, which ends up being executed as valve 2 to 210 and pump 3 to 310 because of a garbled cell connection and total lack of understanding on the part of the late shift new hire intern who's mostly studying to get his GED while "attending" the systems overnight.
Water management runs on a quasi-political budget, expecting efficient management is... optimistic, especially in a small town in a high growth area like Oldsmar.
A hopeful tin-foil hat wearer might think that "the powers that be" targeted Oldsmar to make an example of, do no actual harm but create a national level story that can serve as a prod to get the better WMDs of the country to clean up their own acts, and for the ones that don't sweep through with security inspections with mandatory standards to implement.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2021, @04:08AM
Why would you punch down on someone working on a GED?
If I had brains, I would have taken the GED in my teams, instead of wasting 4 years at a Public Highschool.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 12 2021, @04:50PM
How do you expect remote contractor workers in third world countries to do their jobs? Actually physically be at the plant?
Revolver, or semi automatic modified to be fully automatic -- which is best for senior citizens in their porch swings?