Botnet traced to computer at hacked Florida water plant - CyberScoop

On Feb. 5, an unidentified hacker broke into the computer system of a water treatment plant in the Florida town of Oldsmar and temporarily changed the plant’s sodium hydroxide setting to a potentially dangerous level, according to local officials. It turns out that hacker wasn’t alone on the network. While law enforcement officials still haven’t publicly identified the perpetrator of the well-publicized hack, industrial security firm Dragos on Tuesday revealed a separate suspected intrusion that same day of one of the Oldsmar Water Treatment Facility’s computers. Dragos has tied the malicious code to a botnet, or horde of infected computers used by spammers, whose code scanned the computers of local water utilities in Florida in recent months. There is no connection between the incidents — whoever tampered with the Oldsmar facility’s chemical settings is not involved in the botnet — but the revelation shows how two very different types of hackers […]