In mid-October, a cybersecurity researcher in the Netherlands demonstrated, online, as a warning*, the easy availability of the Internet Protocol address and open, unsecured access points of the industrial control system — the ICS — of a wastewater treatment plant not far from my home in Vermont.

Industrial control systems may sound inconsequential, but as the investigative journalist Andy Greenberg illustrates persuasively in “Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers,” they have become the preferred target of malicious actors aiming to undermine civil society. A wastewater plant, for example, removes contaminants from the water supply; if its controls were to be compromised, public health would be, too.

New York Review of Books