Water networks – secure and resilient?

The world seems to be increasing in chaos and uncertainty, with recent global events affecting us all, or at least having knock-on effects on our day-to-day lives. It is not helped by certain states looking to disrupt the networks our societies rely on.

Disruption can take many forms, from young hackers penetrating government and company servers out of curiosity, through ‘hactivists’ wanting to highlight the vulnerability of company databases, to states such as Russia attempting to divert attention from their own activity by creating disorder in Western democratic processes, or bringing down power distribution systems in Ukraine with cyber warfare.

Some of these news stories and claims may be ‘whipped up’ to create great copy for news outlets, but the reports of real and serious security breaches raise our awareness and cause us to think more carefully about our own systems. Consider the claims of recent cyber-attacks on the water and wastewater networks:

‘Elevated’ risk of hackers targeting UK drinking water, says credit agency

US warns of disruptive attacks on water on systems

Recent cyber-attacks on water and wastewater networks

As water and wastewater engineers we need to check how secure our networks really are, especially when we are increasingly using Internet of Things (IOT) and Edge computing, as well as more traditional SCADA systems with remote terminal units. Can they be easily hacked? Do we have the correct protection in place? Are staff fully aware of the potential breaches and do they have secure passwords, which are not repeated for every system they log onto or shared on emails?

But as well as digital security, how resilient are our water supply systems? What if a water treatment works is brought down by an activist trying to make a political point, or more serious state disruption to power or chemical supplies? Do our water networks have sufficient flexibility to quickly rezone onto another supply? Even without malicious disruption, how would your customers be supplied if critical, strategic mains fail or components for maintenance of pumping stations are unavailable?

The tools are available for monitoring and management of these digital or physical risks. Water engineers and managers need to face these challenges and plan for the worst in our crazy world…