- Breached water plant used same teamviewer software#
- Breached water plant used same teamviewer password#
- Breached water plant used same teamviewer windows 7#
Authorities cannot publicly describe if the attacker accessed TeamViewer using a zero-day vulnerability or by using a known one. So thanks to the quick response of the keen-eyed operator at the treatment plant, the residents of Oldsmar, really did have a lucky escape! How it happenedĪt the time of writing, no arrests have been made. However, the substance is very corrosive, and can have serious health consequences if ingested.
Under normal circumstances, lye is a substance that is added to water to control the acidity. The treatment plant supplies water to around 15,000 residents as well as businesses in the area. This attack could have otherwise had very serious consequences to the population of Oldsmar. The operator monitoring the system at the time of the cyber attack immediately noticed the increase of lye from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million and reversed the change.
Breached water plant used same teamviewer software#
Through remote desktop software TeamViewer, the hacker took control of an employee’s computer at the water treatment plant and subsequently increased the amount of sodium hydroxide (lye) in the water to dangerous levels.
Breached water plant used same teamviewer password#
The shared TeamViewer password was reported earlier by the Associated Press.On Friday 5th February, a hacker tried to poison the water supply of Oldsmar, Florida, after gaining access to the water treatment control system.
Even if the change hadn’t been reversed, the officials said, treatment plant personnel have redundancies in place to catch dangerous conditions before water is delivered to homes and businesses. In larger doses, the chemical is a health hazard.Ĭhristopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reportedly told a House of Representatives Homeland Security committee on Wednesday that the breach was “very likely” the work of “a disgruntled employee.”Ĭity officials said residents were never in danger, because the change was quickly detected and reversed. Lye is used in small amounts to adjust drinking water alkalinity and remove metals and other contaminants. The person on the other end changed the amount of lye added to the water from about 100 parts per million to 11,100ppm. The breach occurred around 1:30pm, when an employee watched the mouse on his city computer moving on its own as an unknown party remotely accessed an interface that controlled the water treatment process. The lack of a firewall and a password that was the same for each employee are also signs that the department’s security regimen wasn’t as tight as it could have been.
Breached water plant used same teamviewer windows 7#
Windows 7 also provides fewer security protections than Windows 10. In January, Microsoft ended support for Windows 7, a move that ended security updates for the operating system. The revelations illustrate the lack of security rigor found inside many critical infrastructure environments. It said: AdvertisementĮmployees in Oldsmar’s water treatment department and city manager’s office didn’t immediately respond to phone messages seeking comment for this post. 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.Ī private industry notification published by the FBI provided a similar assessment. 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.
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. 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. The tampering could have caused severe sickness or death had it not been for safeguards the city has in place.Īccording 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. After gaining remote access to a computer that controlled equipment inside the Oldsmar water treatment plant, the unknown intruder increased the amount of sodium hydroxide-a caustic chemical better known as lye-by a factor of 100. Further Reading Computer intruder tried to poison Florida city’s drinking water with lyeThe computer intrusion happened last Friday in Oldsmar, a Florida city of about 15,000 that’s roughly 15 miles northwest of Tampa.
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