A cyber attack on a water treatment facility in a small town in Florida raises questions about how vulnerable the water supply is in thousands of other places in the United States as authorities try to determine who tried to poison the water two days before the Super. Come.
On Capitol Hill, cybersecurity experts, including the former head of the Department of Homeland Security,’s cyber unit debated who was responsible for cutting off the water supply in Oldsmar, Florida, 20 km outside Tampa.
“I think it’s possible it was an insider or a dissatisfied employee. It’s also possible that it was a foreign actor,” Chris Krebs, the former director of cybersecurity security at DHS, told the House Homeland Security Committee said.
FBI KNOWLEDGE WARNING AMONG FLORIA OLDSMAR WATER TREATMENT INVESTIGATION
Michael Daniel, president and CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance, thinks the attack
I came from overseas.
“Iran has been very interested in water systems in other countries like Israel and even in the United States,” he told lawmakers.
Krebs said more money needs to be spent on upgrading software in the tens of thousands of water treatment facilities nationwide.
“It’s almost counter-intuitive that running a system over the Internet can be a bad thing,” Krebs added.HACKER TRYING POISON POISON FLORIDA WATER SUPPLY NEAR SUPER COMES, POLICE SAY
The cut-off of the cash-strapped water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, with a population of 15,000 residents, took place just 20 miles from the Super Bowl Stadium, northwest of Tampa, last Friday. The demarcated hood briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide, or lye, 100 times before it was discovered by a supervising plant supervisor who saw a pointer move across a computer screen and changed the chemical levels. The hacker was in and out within five minutes, authorities said.
Pinella County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said earlier this week: “We do not know now whether the offense originated from the United States or outside the country.”
Gualtieri told reporters the public never fared. The FBI is investigating. A similar crackdown occurred three times in Israel last year, including in April when suspected Iranian hackers targeted Israel’s water system by raising chlorine levels in water flowing to residential areas. A similar incident took place in Galilee in July in which agricultural pumps were switched off.
In the April attack, six water treatment facilities were hit. In one place a pump was continuously running and data was changed in another place but no significant damage was recorded. Fox News first reported that Iran was probably behind the hood in Israel using US servers. A senior U.S. Department of Energy spokesman at the time said the U.S. government was committed to protecting Israel from cyberattacks, but declined to comment specifically on the incident.
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With the attack in Florida strikingly similar to that of 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 had “contacted its US equivalents about the case as part of the standard and accepted exchange of information in the cyber field, which is intended to divert from other cases in the world learn and extend the methods. of resistance. ‘
In 2013, Iranian hackers invaded the control system of a small dam less than 20 kilometers from New York City. Details of the intrusion remain to be classified.
President Joe Biden met with a group of dual senators in the White House on Thursday to discuss how to fix the country’s potholes and outdated infrastructure, but it is not clear how they plan to tackle the growing cyberattacks on public networks. to address the country – especially the water supply.
Experts mentioned the Florida hack by hand and the result that remote access software connected to the Internet is used without an apparent firewall. All the employees of this water treatment facility used the same program to use the same program.
There are 151,000 municipal water treatment facilities in the United States that are all potentially vulnerable to these types of attacks.
The Associated Press and Trey Yingst and Fox News and Yonat Friling contributed to this report