"Former Contractor Employee Charged for Hacking California Water Treatment Facility"
A 53-year-old man from Tracy, California, has recently been charged for allegedly hacking into the systems of a water treatment facility in an attempt to delete critical software. The suspect, Rambler Gallo, has been charged with “transmitting a program, information, code, and command to cause damage to a protected computer,” but this is a case of unauthorized access rather than actual hacking. Gallo was an employee for a company contracted by the town of Discovery Bay in California to operate its water treatment facility, which serves 15,000 residents. He worked at the company between 2016 and the end of 2020, and during this time, he allegedly installed software that allowed him to access the facility’s systems from his personal computer. After he resigned in January 2021, authorities in the Northern District of California stated that he used that remote access software to enter the water facility’s systems and “transmitted a command to uninstall software that was the main hub of the facility’s computer network and that protected the entire water treatment system, including water pressure, filtration, and chemical levels. Gallo faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.