this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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204
CISA Releases Guidance Urging Water Treatment Facilities to Disconnect Equipment From the Internet (www.privacyguides.org)
submitted 15 hours ago by new_otters_raft@piefed.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

CISA released an urgent message warning water utilities to disconnect their logic controllers from the internet in the face of rising cyberattacks.

The hacks target internet-facing programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that control equipment and allow machinery to communicate. They monitor and control the water pressure, chemical dosing, and other factors to ensure the water is safe.

Many of the PLCs are apparently open to the internet and use default credentials, allowing a remote attacker to easily take them over.

I assume it is this CISA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_and_Infrastructure_Security_Agency

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[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 14 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

What’s extra ridiculous is VPNs are not that hard. I am fantastically awful with networking and even I can wrap my head around a WireGuard tunnel.

[–] Carl@anarchist.nexus 3 points 4 hours ago

The issue is doing one at scale, with proper access controls. Also, let’s not skip past the whole “network isn’t air gapped anymore” side of things. Now you’re having to maintain firewalls, patch firmwares, manage users, enforce good password hygiene, etc… All without any additional IT support or hardware, because management is doing this as a cost cutting measure.

I can pretty much guarantee that the systems that get hacked aren’t the ones that do everything right. They’re the ones who have a single shared VPN password, haven’t updated their firewall since it was installed 8 years ago, and they haven’t even changed the default passwords for their control systems. Because they got tired of answering phone calls about what the password was, so they just made every username and password something stupid like admin/admin.