The only surprise about last week’s hacking of a water treatment plant in Florida is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. The intrusion was all too easy. The hacker entered the plant’s control system through a commonly used tool called TeamViewer, which lets engineers monitor the network’s machines—and adjust their settings—remotely. The hacker boosted the level of lye—an ingredient in drain cleaners—from 100 parts per million, its normal level, to 11,100 parts per million, which would have poisoned anyone drinking the water.
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Hundreds of people in the small town of Oldsmar, near Tampa Bay, avoided illness, possibly death, only because a plant operator noticed the manipulation on the system’s monitors and manually restored the settings to normal. If the operator had been reading or snoozing, letting the system run on autopilot, as sometimes happens at computer-controlled utilities, disaster would have struck.