How Infrastructure Can Also be a Target for Cyber Terrorists

 Article:

Evans, Jack. “Someone Tried to Poison Oldsmar's Water Supply during Hack, Sheriff Says.” Tampa Bay Times. Tampa Bay Times, February 10, 2021. https://www.tampabay.com/news/pinellas/2021/02/08/someone-tried-to-poison-oldsmars-water-supply-during-hack-sheriff-says/. 

Businesses like Equifax aren’t the only entities vulnerable to hackers.  Water treatment plants can be too.  Case in point:  the hacking of the Oldsmar, FL water treatment plant.  

On February 6, 2021, employees at the Oldsmar city water treatment plant noticed something strange:  the sodium hydroxide (lye) level had been changed in the computer managing the treatment plant into add 100 times more of the chemical to the water.  Lye is added to the water to control acidity but it is poisonous in higher levels.  Fortunately, the employees were able to change the lye level back to normal levels immediately before any damage was done.  Even if the employee hadn’t noticed the same afternoon, the plant also has safety protocols that would likely have detected the issue before the extra lye was added.

According to reports, staff noticed someone remotely accessing the plant’s system in the morning but did not find it suspicious because supervisors have the ability to remotely log in to troubleshoot but then someone remotely logged into the system in the afternoon and changed the lye level while an employee was watching. The employee set the level back to its prior level and remote access to the plant was later disabled.  

Although no harm was done in this case, law enforcement and politicians, including Marco Rubio, are encouraging the FBI to treat it as a matter of national security.  This makes sense because it was an effort by a hostile entity to damage the infrastructure of the USA.  It’s basically the same thing as driving to the plant and physically trying to dump lye into the water. It’s just more subtle.

This episode illustrates the importance of monitoring remote access to infrastructure to prevent them from being attacked.  The Oldsmar plant staff were able to fix the issue immediately because they were monitoring remote access.