Two US water authorities' control systems breached

David Heath
Monday, 21 November 2011 23:16

Business IT - Security

In the past few days, two separate US-based water authorities appear to have had their control systems breached - one of them has suffered physical damage.

Originally announced via Joe Weiss' ControlGlobal website and expanded in a number of other reports, it seems that some kind of breach into the control (SCADA) system at Curran-Gardner Townships Public Water District near Springfield, Illinois occurred, leading to the burn-out of a water pump.

According to the secret report obtained by Weiss (dated Nov 10th and referring to the discovery of the attack two days earlier), it appears that the site's control system vendor had previously been hacked and various customer usernames and passwords taken.  Although not stated, presumably this gave insight into how to connect to the Curran-Gardner system.

It appears that once having control of the SCADA system, the intruder was able to repeatedly turn the pump on and off, leading to its burn-out (note some reporters have suggested the SCADA system itself was turned on ad off repeatedly; this is a laughable proposition).  Weiss also reports that the site had been (in hindsight) suffering such issues for a couple of months with site workers commonly observing unexplained problems with the system. 

Back tracking the attack led to an IP address located in Russia, although as most researchers know, such attribution is flimsy at best; in fact the perpetrator could have been absolutely anywhere.  The FBI and DHS were reported to have stated that they are "gathering facts surrounding the report of a water pump failure in Springfield Illinois. At this time there is no credible corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety." 

Really?  A water authority's control system is breached, leading to the destruction of a pump (potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace depending on the size of the pump) and you don't believe there's a risk to critical infrastructure?

Let's segue to a second attack by touching on a November 18th PasteBin posting by its perpetrator (who goes by the handle of 'Pr0f'), who posted five screen shots of various pages in the City of South Houston's water management system.