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Showing posts from March, 2021

Your City’s Water Supply Could Be Targeted by Hackers

  The following is an excerpt taken from the Wall Street Journal by Dave Weinstein on Feb 26, 2021. “I first saw the inside of a water-treatment plant in 2015. I was conducting a site visit at a municipal facility in New Jersey, where I was the state’s director of cybersecurity. It wasn’t an inspection; the plant manager had asked me to visit. Analog machinery had given way to digital systems, and critical water-treatment processes were now automated. The plant required little human intervention in day-to-day operations. Thanks to remote-access technologies, more maintenance and monitoring activities were being performed off-site by a third party. All of this was great for efficiently, especially for the resource-limited operation, but what about the risk? Optimizing for cost and speed meant connecting more digital and networked technologies to the plant floor. Security was no longer simply a matter of gates, guards, and guns. It had become a matter of bits and bytes. In early

Toxic Hexavalent Chromium Released into Tap Water Through Pipes

  The 2000 film “Erin Brockovich,” based on a true story, launched the carcinogen hexavalent chromium into the spotlight. Water supplies in California were tainted with the chemical, which caused a plethora of residents in Hinkley to succumb to cancer and all sorts of other deadly diseases. A new study is bringing this chemical back to light by analyzing the process in which it infiltrates the drinking water supply, specifically when commonly used chlorine disinfectants corrode cast iron water distribution pipes. Chromium occurs naturally and is often added to countless products. Its toxicity varies depending on its state. More than 200 million people in the United States drink tap water with chromium concentrations above .02 ppb, according to the Environmental Working Group . The state of California has set this part-per-billion level to ensure that fewer than one out of a million exposed people will get cancer in their lifetimes. The United States Environmental Protection Agen