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.
Event recap | Tech and data recommendations for the new administration Event Recap by GeoTech Center
Event description
In this episode of the GeoTech Hour, hosted on
Wednesday, January 6, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. EST, panelists make recommendations on how the new administration can prioritize data and tech applications.
Many challenges await in the realms of data and tech, including ensuring the security of the government’s and nation’s software and hardware, improving cloud computing and machine learning abilities, and advancing biotechnology as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold.
Government interventions to ensure a firm recovery from the pandemic will be essential. Creating working groups, councils, and alliances to develop and distribute vaccines and guarantee food security is essential to promoting security and peace. Such coalitions would be best initiated at the lo