As Water Utilities Move Online, Hackers Take Note

Feb 01

America’s power grid has gotten a lot of attention, but water utilities are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks.

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But hackers are looking for ways to test the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure, and while so much attention has been paid to America’s power grid, water utilities are particularly exposed. Hackers and state-sponsored terrorists are “mapping the control systems for water and wastewater [systems] to understand where the controls systems are located,” says Dr. Paul Stockton, a former assistant secretary of defense and managing director of Sonecon, a Washington-based security consulting firm. “This kind of mapping could be preparatory work in anticipation of attacks that are designed to disable and disrupt critical infrastructure.”

Indeed, the FBI confirmed in 2014 that operatives in China, Iran and Russia were doing just such a mapping operation, looking for cybersecurity weaknesses in the country’s water and electric infrastructure.

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