The Rising Tide of Water Utility Cyber Threats: How Dragos Shields Water Systems
Summary: Dragos reports that in November 2023 the CyberAv3ngers hacktivist group compromised PLCs at water utilities across North America, Europe, and Australia, the first successful cyber attacks on water systems by hacktivists, disrupting water services for two days in at least one community. Dragos attributes the success to low technical sophistication paired with inadequate security measures such as default passwords on internet-exposed OT devices, and its Water and Wastewater Threat Perspective finds nearly 60 percent of identified high-severity OT vulnerabilities in the sector relate to controller assets including PLCs and VFDs.
What you should know: The attacks that cut off a community's water for two days did not require advanced tradecraft, only default passwords on internet-exposed OT devices, and the FBI's February disclosure that VOLTZITE, overlapping with Volt Typhoon, has already penetrated US and global critical infrastructure means the next attempt may not be so crude.
Read the original at Dragos Blog ↗
- Topics
- OT / ICS & Critical Infrastructure
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