A cyber attack on a water treatment plant in a small town in Florida is raising questions about the vulnerability of water supplies in thousands of other locations in the United States, as authorities try to determine who tried to poison the water two days before the Super Bowl.
On Wednesday at the Capitol, cybersecurity experts, including the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber unit, debated who could be responsible for the water supply hack in Oldsmar, Florida, 12 miles from Tampa .
“I think it is possible that he is an insider or a disgruntled employee. It is also possible that he is a foreign actor,” Chris Krebs, former director of security for cybersecurity infrastructure at DHS, told the House’s Homeland Security Committee.
FBI PROBLEMS ALERT IN FLORIDA OLDSMAR WATER TREATMENT HACKING INVESTIGATION
Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance, thinks the attack
I came from abroad.
“Iran has shown itself to be very interested in the water systems of other countries like Israel and even the United States,” he told lawmakers.
Krebs said more money needs to be spent to update the software at tens of thousands of water treatment plants across the country.
“It’s almost counterintuitive that managing a system over the Internet is a bad thing,” added Krebs.HACKER TRIED TO POISON FLORIDA’S WATER SUPPLY NEAR THE SUPER BOWL, THE POLICE SAY
The hack at the cashless water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, with a population of 15,000, occurred last Friday just 19 kilometers from the Super Bowl stadium, northwest of Tampa. The poorly made hack briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide, or caustic soda, by 100 times before it was discovered by an alert plant supervisor who saw a cursor move across the computer screen and change chemical levels. The hacker came and went in five minutes, officials said.
Pinella County sheriff Bob Gualtieri said earlier this week: “We do not know now whether the violation originated in the United States or outside the country.”
Gualtieri told reporters at no time was the public in danger. The FBI is investigating. A similar hack occurred in Israel three times in the past year, including in April, when suspected Iranian hackers attacked Israel’s water system by increasing the levels of chlorine in the water flowing into residential areas. A similar incident occurred in July in Galilee, closing agricultural bombs.
In the April attack, six water treatment plants were hit. In one location, a pump went into continuous operation and data was changed in another, but no significant damage was recorded. Fox News reported for the first time that Iran was probably behind the hack in Israel using American servers. A senior US Department of Energy official said at the time that the United States government was committed to protecting Israel from cyber attacks, but declined to comment specifically on the incident.
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With the Florida attack having a striking resemblance to April and July in Israel, Israeli officials offered to help with the Florida case.
Israel’s National Cyber Directorate said in a statement to Fox News that it “contacted its US counterparts about the case as part of the standard and accepted the sharing of information in the cyber field, which is intended to learn from other cases in the world and increase resistance methods. “
In 2013, Iranian hackers infiltrated the control system of a small dam less than 20 miles from New York City. The details of this intrusion remain confidential.
At the White House on Thursday, President Joe Biden met with a group of bipartisan senators to talk about how to fix the country’s holes and outdated infrastructure, but it is unclear how they plan to deal with the growing cyber attacks on public networks. country – especially its water supply.
Experts find the Florida hack clumsy and the result of using remote access software connected to the Internet without an apparent firewall. All employees at this water treatment plant accessed the program with the same password.
There are 151,000 municipal water treatment plants in the United States, all of which are potentially vulnerable to this type of attack.
The Associated Press and Trey Yingst and Yonat Friling of Fox News contributed to this report