Starting with small projects, such as a water-treatment system for Singapore's bird zoo, she gradually got bigger and better projects.

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In the early 1990s, when privatisation was still heresy in Brazil, Mr Palocci, then mayor of Ribeirao Preto, a city in Sao Paulo's farmbelt, sold the municipal telephone company and called on private investors to build a water-treatment system.

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Other times the attacks are more personal:In 2000 a discontented consultant, rejected for a job at a water treatment plant in Australia, remotely hacked into a sewage treatment system and released 264, 000 gallons of raw sewage into rivers and parks.

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Because so much of our infrastructure including the electrical grid, water and sewage treatment, as well as our transportation system is computerized.

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