Lye-poisoning attack in Florida shows cybersecurity gaps in water systems
Bryson Bort, a cybersecurity consultant who helped start ICS Village, a nonprofit that raises awareness of cybersecurity for industrial systems, said such a practice — setting up a computer program to allow users to take control of sensitive industrial systems — is extremely common in industrial systems that don’t have the means to employ staffs of experts to be on call at all hours.
“If you think about it, you have a challenge both technically and resourcewise with being able to manage things,” he said in a phone interview. “So the ability to get an alert light at 3 a.m. and get that one expert has value. People are always mystified that this is the way it is, but this is the way it is. It’s the convenience of these resource constraints. You don’t have a choice.”
