Spotlight – Q&A |


Facing up to cyber security


Andrew Nix, Operational Cybersecurity Consultant at Schneider Electric, tells IWP&DC that water companies, including hydroelectric facilities, are facing growing cyber security threats, and offers advice on how facilities can ensure they are unattractive targets for attack


What kind of cyber security threats are water and power projects facing? In the water industry – whether its from the perspective of a dam, hydropower project or water treatment facility – cybersecurity as a whole is becoming more and more important. Cyber threats are growing and advancing, they are becoming more automated and more intelligent in how they identify and attack targets. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cyber crime will cost the global economy $6 trillion this year, which is more than the GDP of the UK – it’s an impressive number.


A lot of companies and utilities in the water industry


don’t really recognise themselves as a potential target for cyber attacks, when in reality they are an ideal target. We’re really starting to see that impact more and more in the water space. The reason for this may be tied to the state of the equipment in the water space – with equipment of different ages, from different manufacturers and operating with different protocol. The amount of uniqueness and differentiation between all those devices poses a big challenge to a facility because it can be very difficult to manage the security of all the different equipment from all those various vendors – they use different patches, different operating systems, offer differing levels of support, etc. There is quite a lot of work involved in helping to


Below: Andrew Nix


secure infrastructure and ensure the whole facility is protected from all the different elements it contains. As an example, if you go and buy a new phone there is always some inbuilt cybersecurity functions for that specific device. However, you then go and install apps, use the internet, get your email, and allow your kids to play on it. That’s a lot of unknowns for the manufacturers. We can’t necessarily cater to all of that, and so it’s really important that you have tools that help you secure the entire facility, the entire network and everything in it, regardless of manufacturer. It’s so important to be cyber secure in water because


of the extremely critical services provided. Like we saw at a water treatment facility in Florida back in February this year, if someone’s able to, for example, cause an event, manipulate process integrity, cause an outage, damage equipment, or contaminate the product, that can impact the lives and the safety of hundreds or thousands of people. Attackers understand this. They know that if they can cause pain to the facility, if they can cause an outage, that’s the easiest way to get someone to pay them. They’ll get their revenue, and then move on to


8 | December 2021 | www.waterpowermagazine.com


the next target. They recognise that targeting water is one of the easiest ways to do that, because of all the differences in equipment and the inherent risks in that environment.


Has the move to home and remote working made it easier for facilities to be targeted? It absolutely has. I think one of the reasons for that is that organisations really struggle with the proper way to remotely operate a facility. They don’t often give workers the right tools to remotely view what’s happening, or take remote control of certain aspects of the facility. When you’re an employee sitting at home, you may be doing what you think is the right thing to get to that facility to, for example, view SCADA screen and things of that nature – but that is a potential attack avenue. The home network is inherently not as secure as the operational network that you’re connecting to. If you have a vulnerability at home, somebody could manipulate that to get through your system and into an operational computer. We’ve seen that a lot in in different industries where remote access poses a threat. The other side of that is for the operators at the site who may not know the difference between an attacker that’s manipulating a remote access platform, and a legitimate person trying to make changes. They just see someone that’s connected trying to do things and they don’t know if that’s an approved action or a


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