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Galveston Main Bank: 1801 45th St. • (409) 763-1271Seawall Branch: 45th & Seawall Blvd. • (409) 763-5252

Internet: www.HomeTown.Bank

The Motor Bank at our Galveston Main Bank (Avenue P)will be closed due to construction beginning

Tuesday, February 9th and will reopen on Tuesday, February 16th.In order to better serve you, we will have

extended lobby hours during this time. The Seawall drive through will remain open

with regular hours of operation.

GCDN Ad Copy for Wednesday, 2-10-21

1/8 page (3 col. [5”] by 5”)

Black & White

The City of Galveston Grants & Housing Dept. has funding available for up to 6-months of rental assistance payments for Galveston City residents experiencing a reduction or loss of income due to COVID-19. This program can also provide rental assistance for Galveston tenants being sued for eviction. Basic Criteria to apply for funding:

• Must live in Galveston City • Must meet HUD’s low-moderate income requirements • Must have a documented financial impact due to COVID-19 • Other Restrictions Do Apply

You are NOT eligible if you receive Public Housing or Section 8 Voucher Assistance or are receiving any other rental assistance. Application deadline is February 26, 2021. Application with submittal information and TERAP information is available: • Online at https://www.galvestontx.gov/1126/Texas-Emergency-Rental-

Assistance-Progra or contact Grants & Housing Dept. • Due to Limited Funding, Applications will be placed in a Lottery Drawing

Contact for information: City of Galveston Grants & Housing Dept. (409) 797-3820 or Email TBRAProgram@galvestontx.gov

The City of Galveston Affirmatively Furthers Fair Housing

Texas Emergency Rental Assistance Program (TERAP)

for COVID-19 Impacted Households

COrOnaVIrus OuTbreaK | VACCINATIONS POLICe | BOTCHED HACK OF WATER SUPPLY

Associated Press

The United States has en-tered a tricky phase of the COVID-19 vaccination effort as providers try to ramp up the number of people getting first shots while also ensuring a growing number of others get second doses just when millions more Americans are becoming eligible to receive vaccines.

The need to give each per-son two doses a few weeks apart vastly complicates the country’s biggest-ever vac-cination campaign. And persistent uncertainty about future vaccine supplies fuels worries that some people will not be able to get their second shots in time.

In some cases, local health departments and providers have said they must tempo-rarily curb or even cancel appointments for first doses to ensure there are enough second doses for people who need them.

Nola Rudolph said she struggled to book appoint-ments for her 71-year-old fa-ther and 68-year-old mother, who live in rural upstate New York. Everywhere she looked within driving distance was booked.

“Seeing they were eligible, I was elated,” she said. “See-ing they were in a dead zone, I went from very hopeful to hopeless again.”

She was able to arrange a second dose for her father but has not yet been able to find a slot for her mother. “It’s like going around in a circle.”

For about the past month, the United States has admin-istered an average of 900,000 first doses each day, according to data from the U.S. Cen-ters for Disease Control and

Prevention analyzed by The Associated Press. Now many of those people are due for second doses, and the average number of Americans getting second shots hit an all-time high Tuesday — 539,000 per day over the past week.

The increasing demand for second doses comes as the Biden administration is tak-ing steps to boost the supply of doses.

White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients an-nounced Tuesday that states will see their allocation of doses rise to 11 million per week beginning next week, up more than 2 million week-ly doses since President Joe Biden took office.

Since the vaccine was au-thorized in late December, about 33 million people in the United States have received shots.

“It’s really important and critical to recognize that there are still not enough doses to go around,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

So far, about 10 percent of the U.S. population has re-

ceived at least one dose of the vaccine. About 3 percent has received both doses, the AP analysis showed.

Across Los Angeles Coun-ty, health officials say limited supplies mean the majority of vaccinations this week will be for second doses. In the state’s Napa County, some appoint-ments for first doses were can-celed last week to ensure there would be enough for second doses.

“We’re getting a lot of the questions from community members asking, ‘Is my sec-ond dose in jeopardy?’ And right now, we don’t have an answer because it’s all depen-dent on the inventory that comes in from the state,” said Alfredo Pedroza, a county su-pervisor.

Both COVID-19 vaccines being distributed in the Unit-ed States require two shots a few weeks apart to maximize protection. For Pfizer, the dos-es are supposed to be three weeks apart. For Moderna, it’s four weeks. But if needed, the booster can be delayed for up to six weeks, according to the CDC, which updated its guid-ance late last month.

Associated Press

» ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.

A hacker’s botched at-tempt to poison the water supply of a small Florida city is raising alarms about just how vulnerable the na-tion’s water systems may be to attacks by more sophis-ticated intruders. Treat-ment plants are typically cash-strapped and lack the cybersecurity depth of the power grid and nuclear plants.

A local sheriff’s startling announcement Mon-day that the water supply of Oldsmar, population 15,000, was briefly in jeop-ardy last week exhibited uncharacteristic transpar-ency. Suspicious incidents are rarely reported and usu-ally chalked up to mechan-ical or procedural errors, experts say. No federal re-porting requirement exists, and state and local rules vary widely.

“In the industry, we were all expecting this to happen. We have known for a long time that municipal water utilities are extremely un-derfunded and under-re-sourced, and that makes them a soft target for cyber attacks,” said Lesley Car-hart, principal incident re-sponder at Dragos Security, which specializes in indus-trial control systems.

“I deal with a lot of mu-nicipal water utilities for small, medium and large-sized cities. And in a lot of cases, all of them have a very small IT staff. Some of them have no dedicated security staff at all,” she said.

The nation’s 151,000 public water systems lack the financial fortification of the corporate owners of nuclear power plants and electrical utilities. They are a heterogenous patchwork, less uniform in technology and security measures than in other rich countries.

As the computer net-works of vital infrastruc-ture become easier to reach via the internet — and

with remote access multi-plying dizzily during the COVID-19 pandemic — security measures often get sacrificed.

“It’s a hard problem, but one that we need to start addressing,” said Joe Slowik, senior security researcher at DomainTools. He said the hack illustrates “a systemic weakness in this sector.”

Cybersecurity experts said the attack at the plant 15 miles northwest of Tam-pa seemed ham-handed, it was so blatant: Whoever breached Oldsmar’s plant on Friday using a remote access program shared by plant workers briefly in-creased the amount of lye — sodium hydroxide — by a factor of 100, according to Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri. Lye is used to lower acidity, but in high concentrations it is highly caustic and can burn. It’s found in drain cleaning products.

The intruder’s timing and visibility seemed al-most comical to cyberse-curity experts. A supervisor monitoring a plant console about 1:30 p.m. saw a cur-sor move across the screen and change settings, Gual-tieri said, and was able to immediately reverse it. The intruder was in and out in five minutes.

The public was never in peril, though the intruder took “the sodium hydrox-

ide up to dangerous levels,” the sheriff said. Also, plant safeguards would have de-tected the chemical alter-ation in the 24-36 hours it would have taken to affect the water supply, he said.

Gualtieri said Tuesday that water goes to holding tanks before reaching cus-tomers, and “it would have been caught by a secondary chemical check.” He did not know if the hacker was domestic or foreign — and said no one related to a plant employee was suspected. He said the FBI and Secret Service were assisting in the investigation. How the hacker got in remains un-clear, he said, though it was possible the hacker was able to create administrator cre-dentials.

Jake Williams, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec, said en-gineers have been creating safeguards “since before re-mote control via cyber was a thing,” making it highly unlikely the breach could have led to “a cascade of failures” tainting Oldsmar’s water.

There’s been an uptick in hacking attempts of water treatment plants in the past year, the cybersecurity firm FireEye said, but most were by novices, many stum-bling on systems while us-ing a kind of search engine for industrial control sys-tems called Shodan.

US vaccine drive complicated by 1st, 2nd dose juggling act

JOE CAVARETTA/South Florida Sun-Sentinel file photoA woman asks directions at the entrance to Vista View Park where a COVID-19 vaccination site has opened for second doses in Davie, Florida, on Jan. 27.

Hack exposes vulnerability of cash-strapped US water plants

PINELLAS COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICEIn this screen shot from a YouTube video posted by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri speaks during a news confer-ence as Oldsmar, Florida, Mayor Eric Seidel, left, listens Monday in Oldsmar, Florida.