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Turns out that Florida water treatment facility left the doors wide open for hackers


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2021 Feb 11, 2:15pm   127 views  1 comment

by Eric Holder   ➕follow (5)   💰tip   ignore  

By now, you’ve probably heard the theoretically scary story of how hackers managed to infiltrate the computer systems at a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida and remotely control the chemical levels — but it turns out that description gives the hackers far, far too much credit.

The reality? The water treatment plant itself left off-the-shelf remote control software on these critical computers — and apparently never, ever bothered to change the password.

An official cybersecurity advisory about the incident from the state of Massachusetts (via Ars Technica) explains that the SCADA control system was accessed via TeamViewer, the kind of remote desktop application an IT administrator might roll out to remotely troubleshoot computers — not something you’d generally want hooked up to a critical system. More importantly, and here I will just quote the Massachusetts report verbatim:

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.


https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22277300/florida-water-treatment-chemical-tamper-teamviewer-shared-password

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1   SunnyvaleCA   2021 Feb 11, 2:27pm  

Physical security (locks, etc) can be equally badly set up, but the mistakes are great fun and easily understood by non-technical people. Reminds me of this security professional's presentation. Check out at about 4:40 ... physically breaking into a poorly secured (you guessed it!) water treatment facility for a $1 tool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnmcRTnTNC8

This guy has a bunch of entertaining presentations. I'd recommend the one linked above as well as the one on elevators.

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