SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2021, @12:10PM
Thank you for your reply.
As i see it:
Motivation is mostly irrelevant (from my POV as admin of the network).
Daily production _must happen_, all unauthorised changes that even remotely endanger production are sabotage.
While i agree that minor/symbolic acts of sabotage can be good and provide awareness to people who do not want to be aware of the problems,... it still rubs me the wrong way.
This is a waterworks, so i suppose whoever changed the values knew what they were doing and so danger to people was minimal.
Had it been on my network, id appreciate an informal heads-up from the dude doing it so that its not a surprise, i guess.
I wouldn't rat him out, and would deny that i ever spoke to him should management ask, and would provide workarounds around my monitoring.
I'm all for non-traditional solutions to non-traditional problems, but the hierarchy of power must be respected, i mean... like,...
Them owners/management entrust me their hardware to babysit and configure, the least i can do is to do what they ask.
"Let's hope cool heads prevail, and the majority of the effort is spent of improving their plant systems rather than locating a scapegoat." - absolutely agree, its very important to look at these things constructively.
In the end, that is what people pay us the wages for.