Perhaps the first was over two decades ago when a disgruntled employee at Maroochy Shire (Australia) took control of 142 pumping stations for three months and released more than 1 million liters of sewage into local waterways. Q: Have cyberattacks been attempted against water treatment plants in the past?Ī: There have been several documented cases where water treatment facilities have been targeted through hacking. The employee saw the attack take place as the hacker gained control of the computer through the TeamViewer software. Question: How did hackers attempt to poison the water supply in Oldsmar, Florida?Īnswer: Hackers obtained remote access to a workstation running the TeamViewer software, attempting to increase the amount of lye in the water, which can be poisonous if consumed in great enough quantities. Shakarian answered questions for ASU Now about the Florida water system hack. Treasury and Sunburst hacks, and North Korea recently duping cybersecurity experts into downloading malicious code earlier this month. His expertise includes working with businesses and municipalities to avoid attacks like the water system in Oldsmar, the December’s U.S. CYR3CON’s customer base includes Fortune 500 companies and financial institutions. Shakarian also is the CEO and co-founder of ASU spinout company CYR3CON, which uses machine learning technology to predict exploits before hackers use them. While the perpetrators of the Florida attack have not yet been identified, Paulo Shakarian, an Arizona State University cybersecurity expert and researcher for the Global Security Initiative, suspects it was a national adversary and not a bad actor motivated by a ransom or payout. “Our graduates should be aware of the cybersecurity dimensions of their craft and understand enough to ensure the experts put in that security.”
“The implication – that all infrastructure, even apparently physical infrastructure like water, is subject to cyberattack – means that we need to figure out how to get cybersecurity into civil and environmental engineering education,” said Braden Allenby, an Arizona State University environmental engineer who studies sustainable engineering. Thwarted before the hack could cause any harm, the incident exposed the hackable vulnerabilities that remain unchecked in America’s aging infrastructure. Hackers were able to remotely access the water treatment plant in the small town of Oldsmar, Florida, last week – endangering the lives of about 15,000 people in the Tampa Bay area by briefly increasing the amount of sodium hydroxide (lye) released into the system. FebruASU cybersecurity expert explains what happened
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