What can municipalities do to better protect their water supply systems?
We reported recently about an attack against the water supply in Oldsmar, Florida, and worry about the potential for future and copycat attacks against other lightly defended water treatment systems in small towns worldwide and what can be done to stem such incursions.
In the Florida case, criminals used remote access tools to gain a foothold and change chemical levels in the water supply, ramping them up to potentially hazardous levels.
That’s worrisome, including because hackers would normally have to gain specific knowledge of water treatment management systems, a very specific target demographic. That’s not a “spray and pray” attack; it’s targeted and takes some time to craft and deploy. And while this incident wasn’t a super stealthy zero-day attack, chances are that somebody was interested in the target for some time.
From the attacker perspective (meaning a typical intentional attacker devising and executing a well-thought-out attack), how could such a scenario play out?
First, the attackers identify the target, they gather information and form a plan. Once access has been gained, they then need to scour the network for the control systems that interact directly with the water treatment process. Again, this can take significant time and planning.
Once potential targets have been identified, attackers need to understand what role those targets have in the chemical process and what access those systems have to the physical equipment involved in production, whether valves, relays, level sensors, thermocouples or other controls.
Then they have to craft a specific attack within the context they ..
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