The hacker that tried to poison a town’s water supply

When a hacker logged into a Florida water treatment plant in 2021 through TeamViewer and tried to poison an entire town by increasing sodium hydroxide levels to dangerous levels, it sent shockwaves through the industry.

Fortunately, an employee happened to be working near the computer that was being manipulated and caught it before the water was poisoned, but what if they hadn't?

Our Space and Wireless team at Vocus has spent the past year working on a solution that takes remote infrastructure off the public internet entirely, designed to keep customers and Australia safe and secure from malicious cyber threats.

We've just launched Australia's first Layer 2 private network capability over Starlink, and it’s designed to change how we protect critical infrastructure, no matter how remote.

The security nightmare keeping utilities awake

Here's what I've learned from talking to utilities across Australia: they face a difficult decision.

Strict security policies – especially under the Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) Act – strongly discourage their control systems from being exposed to the public internet.

Yet many remote pumping stations and treatment plants have no other connectivity option.

The alternatives aren't great. Building fibre to a very remote site can be costly and take 18 months. Traditional satellite services have slow response times given they’re in an orbit 36,000 km from Earth.

This leaves utilities caught between regulation and reality. They can’t expose systems to the public internet, yet fibre and traditional satellite may not be practical. Without viable alternatives, compliance is unachievable and security gaps remain open – and that’s exactly what adversaries exploit.

Building a private satellite highway

We've done something that's never been done before in Australia. We've established private peering points with Starlink in Sydney and Perth, essentially creating a "private highway" for sensitive data.

Instead of your critical infrastructure data mixing with everyone else's on the internet, it travels on a separate network layer, with data going from your remote site directly into your corporate network.

There are no public IP addresses, because these connections are not even part of the internet, which means a vastly reduced attack surface for hackers.

Real-world testing with water utilities

We've been quietly testing this with an Australian water utility across seven sites. When you're managing SCADA systems that control water flow to thousands of homes and sewerage away from them, security isn't negotiable. These systems need to be accessible for monitoring and control, but completely isolated from public networks.

The feedback has been remarkable. One operations manager told me that before we brought this solution to him, he’d been considering a multi-hop microwave solution that would have required expensive infrastructure builds including towers and antennas. Now the utility can connect sites securely in weeks, not years, and at a small fraction of the cost.

Thanks to our critical infrastructure customers

Starlink has undoubtedly transformed satellite connectivity, but we heard loud and clear from critical infrastructure customers that ‘out of the box’, the standard service didn’t have the specific features enterprises with critical infrastructure need.

One requirement for critical infrastructure customers is to be able to – as much as possible – manage their network as one single architecture, without products hanging off the edge operating in different ways. Our new Vocus IP WAN over Starlink Ethernet Access provides that, allowing the same security profile to be applied to satellite-connected sites as fibre connections.

We're also providing quality of service profiles that prioritise critical applications like voice and the vital operational technology telemetry – the streaming numbers that show how well equipment and controls are working.

Engineering for connectivity that never blinks

Reliability is equally important to security, which is why Vocus is also actively working on providing other low Earth orbit satellite networks to provide extra resilience.

We’ve recently announced that Vocus will introduce an all-new LEO satellite network into Australia – Telesat Lightspeed.

That's crucial because recent digital infrastructure disasters in Australia and globally have demonstrated that multiple links from one provider offer inadequate backup.

When an entire provider fails, alternative networks become essential. By integrating completely separate LEO satellite networks, one can take over if the other has an outage.

For the thousands of NBN Business Satellite customers facing the December 2025 withdrawal of that service, we're also offering a smooth migration path that doesn't compromise on security or performance.

The days of choosing between connectivity and security for remote infrastructure are over. After what happened in Florida, utilities can't afford to take chances with critical infrastructure. Now, they don't have to.