Man grounded for cyber attack on East Bay water treatment plant

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DISCOVERY BAY – A 53-year-old Tracy man was sentenced to six months of house arrest for a cyberattack on the Discovery Bay water treatment plant in 2021, according to prosecutors.

According to the US Attorney’s Office, the verdict was announced on May 8th.

A federal grand jury indicted Rambler Gallo last June, charging him with a single felony: transmitting a program, information, code and instructions intended to damage a protected computer, prosecutors said. Gallo pleaded guilty to the charge.

Gallo was a full-time employee for a Massachusetts-based company that had hired Discovery Bay to operate the town’s water treatment plant, which serves 15,000 residents.

Prosecutors said Gallo installed software on his PC and on the company’s internal network that gave him remote access to the plant’s computer system.

About five weeks after his resignation on Nov. 25, 2020, Gallo accessed the plant’s computer system and sent a command to uninstall software that protected the water treatment system, including pressure, filtration and chemical levels, prosecutors said.

Other employees discovered the software was disabled a day after the cyberattack.

Gallo’s actions “were well thought out to be as disruptive as possible” and posed “a potential threat to the health and safety of the community’s water supply,” prosecutors said.

In addition to the home sentence, U.S. District Court Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. ordered Gallo to serve three years of probation, forfeit his computer and pay $44,250 in restitution.

For more information, visit The Mercury News

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