The Sewage Incident - When Operational Technology Isn't Secure

Key Takeaways

[Music] Hell hath no fury doesn't just apply to people scorned in love in early 2000 the sewage system in Australia's Marucci Shire suddenly had a big problem almost overnight there were hundreds of thousands of gallons of sewage spilling everywhere into Fields Parks rivers and the sewage plant Engineers were scrambling to figure it out this is darknet Diaries oh [Music] Australian shires are like American counties and Marucci Shire has about 130 000 residents and it's in Australia's state of Queensland about 60 miles north of Brisbane the shires Wastewater system like many similar systems around the world uses scada scada controls things like Valves and gates at sewage plants scada systems often need to be extra secure so a lot of them aren't Internet connected and these sewage pumps weren't Internet connected in order to control them you had to be at the sewage plant or at one of the pumping stations there was just no way to access them outside of that and there were over 140 pumping stations across this area from January to April of 2000 the Wastewater systems experienced quite a few mysterious outages like false alarms would sometimes happen or pumping configs would get out of whack and sometimes remote pumps would just go dark and a crew would have to go on site to restore connectivity the wastewater treatment systems were Main contained by a company called Hunter Water Tech and one of its Engineers was tasked with figuring out why these mysterious problems were happening but if you've troubleshot anything ever you know how annoying and hard it can be to fix a problem that only sporadically happens if you can't replicate the problem it's really hard to find a solution for it so he was having trouble figuring out why problems kept happening he would fix a problem but then a new problem would arise like a week or two later and then he'd fix that but then the original problem would come back he eventually decided to just reinstall the whole scada system but the pumping problems came back anyway no scada systems are OT systems not it OT is operational technology and it requires a totally different skill set than someone who's good at it OT is stuff that controls pumps and Valves and Industrial Equipment the engineers were trying to figure out what was going on so they installed some logging software on these systems and by March of 2003 months into troubleshooting this they realize all these problems were caused by a human someone was going into these systems and causing them to malfunction someone was sabotaging the sewage plant and specifically whoever was doing this was focused on creating problems for pumping station number 14. this shouldn't be possible the engineers at Hunter water tech weren't the ones doing this this wasn't the work of some incompetent engineer or something someone was accessing this pumping station from outside the company and like I said earlier this pumping station was air gapped the only way to get in there was to be present at the station and have physical access to the controllers it not possible to connect to any of these stations through the internet the engineers checked out pumping station number 14 but were baffled when they found it was working properly no indicators of faultiness anywhere well usually at least on the rare occasion like maybe once a week or every other week a fault would occur and they'd scramble to fix it right away and while these faults were being tracked down and fixed the pumping station in a suburb in Queensland failed sending 264 thousand gallons of raw sewage to just spill out everywhere at first into a field but then the sewage flowed into some residential areas and that flowed into a park which then flowed into a river cleanup Crews were quickly dispatched to try to divert and contain the sewage and keep people back after this spell Hunter watertech had enough of this sabotage and contacted the police they turned over logs and information that they gathered in their investigation and the police looked through this information and their number one suspect was 48 year old vitek Bowden vitek was a former employee of Hunter water tech a company that operated the sewage plants but vitec recently resigned from the company when the police caught up with vitek they found him near a pumping station with equipment in his car radios antennas programmable logic controllers and a laptop vitek said he was just doing some research and was not there to sabotage the place police had enough evidence to arrest him vitek worked as the site supervisor for Hunter water tech on this very sewage plant he's the one who installed the pump controls for some of the pump stations but vitek didn't have good relations with his bosses they didn't agree with some of the things he was doing like the way he would install firmware on some of these pumps was not the way he was told to do it and so his bosses came down on him for that and this caused some tensions in December of 1999 vitek had an argument with his superiors and quit his job at the sewage plant apparently he was pretty unhappy about what happened there and wanted to exact revenge on Hunter Water Tech and his boss is there vitek had been using his knowledge of the industrial control system to overload it by using his own laptop and a radio and a programmable logic controller a PLC that he took from Hunter water tech since he was the one who set up some of these pumping stations and he knew how they were configured he knew that they were controllable by Wireless radios and he remembered what frequency those radio videos were set to so if he had the right equipment and drove close enough to pumping Station 14 and aimed his antenna just right he could connect to it and manipulate it he even did things to cover his tracks to make it look like it was just malfunctioning over a four-month period in early 2000 vitek remotely connected to Marucci shire's sewage system over 40 times which ultimately resulted in him causing the sewage system to fail and hundreds of thousands of gallons of sewage spilling everywhere making this the first Revenge sewage attack ever in October 2001 vitek was jailed for two years and fined over thirteen thousand dollars making him one of Australia's most notorious hackers well at least according to the Sydney Morning Herald I'm Jack recider thanks for listening to hear more stories like this check out my podcast Dark Knight Diaries [Music]