Officials said that the water treatment system does run on Windows 7, which reached its end of life in January 2020, but Dragos cybersecurity firm CEO Rob Lee told CNN that an operating system exploit is not believed to be involved in this case. The current remote access product used to control the water supply, a Google Chrome extension, is not believed to be compromised. Oldsmar officials said that they had no reason to believe current or former employees were involved but were conducting interviews of them as a precaution. TeamViewer said that it saw no suspicious activity on its end. Officials told the media that they did not know how the attacker gained access to the water supply system, but they may have obtained a password to the outdated remote access system. The general public of Oldsmar may have never been in any real danger, but the attack is nevertheless very concerning based simply on the attempt to do physical harm and how far the hackers were able to get. A spokesperson for the treatment plant later said that additional safety precautions were in place an automated shutoff system would have engaged upon detecting abnormal and dangerous chemical levels in the water supply even if the operator had not been present. When the attacker increased the level of sodium hydroxide (lye) in the water supply to 11,100 parts per million (over 100x the normal level), the operator was able to quickly reverse the attack. That was part of what tipped off a safety operator to the attempted attack. However, it had not been used at the Oldsmar water treatment plant in over six months. The remote access software in this case, TeamViewer, is very commonly used. As many industrial sites do, the city’s water treatment plant uses remote access software to allow higher-level employees and members of management to access the water supply system at any time. Oldsmar is a small city of about 15,000 that sits on the Tampa Bay between Tampa and Clearwater. Water supply threatened by unknown parties While the attempt was spotted and headed off by a plant operator before it could do any damage, it raises questions about how serious a threat this sort of terrorist or nation-state action could be in the future.
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