Hacker targets S. Houston sewer system, mayor says no harm done

A hacker identified only as "pr0f" posted diagrams of the South Houston sewer system online to show how easy it is to infiltrate the system.

South Houston Mayor Joe Soto said this morning that no harm was done to the sewer system, and the control system known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition has been taken offline.

"The plant runs automatically anyway," said Soto, who said he found out Friday about the hacking. "We just disconnected the SCADA system. That takes us off being online, where someone could change some of the operations on their own."

The Department of Homeland Security and FBI are responding to the incident and will be investigating, Soto said.

The hacker said he posted South Houston's information after a similar incident in Springfield, Ill., which reportedly caused the control system to power on and off, burning out a water pump.

In a statement on the Illinois incident, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Peter Boogaard told SC Magazine, "DHS and the FBI are gathering facts surrounding the report of a water pump failure in Springfield, Ill. At this time there is no credible, corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety."

That reaction incensed pr0f. "Insanely stupid," he wrote on pastebin.com. "I dislike, immensely, how the DHS tend to downplay how absolutely F*****D the state of national infrastructure is."

Pr0f told the Chronicle that he is not in the Houston area and picked the South Houston system "more or less" at random.

"It was the first system I saw after reading about the Illinois hack," he wrote in an email.

The hacker also said it was easy to access South Houston's online infrastructure diagrams. He said he had no intention of harming the plant, but just wanted to prove a point.

"I wouldn't even call this a hack.... This required almost no skill and could be reproduced by a 2-year-old with a basic knowledge of Simatic," he wrote.

carol.christian@chron.com

Source: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Hacker-targets-S-Houston-sewer-system-mayor-2277795.php

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