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By Shaun Gallagher, WRAL Reporter
After cyberattacks hit water facilities in 7 states, Raleigh
Water says it’s prepared
“We’re in a good spot,” Ed Buchan, Raleigh Water Assistant
Director said. “We don’t want to ever talk in absolutes in this business but I
think we’ve done our due diligence to protect ourselves from this type of
cyberattack.”
More than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota were
hit by the attack. A law enforcement official who spoke to NBC News says the
attack in Minnesota has the hallmarks of Iranian meddling
A warning from a Wisconsin Department of Natural Rerop which triggered alarms and
prompted a response from law enforcement. A Minnesota spokesperson denied that
happened
The federal Cyberseucrity and Infrastructure Security Agency
said some larger attacks on water infrastructure he “resulted in boil water
notices and sustained manual operations,” but did not say what locations
CISA acting director Nick Andersen provided a statement on the matter: “CISA is currently observing a significant increase in cyber threat actors targeting programmable logic controllers (PLC) at water utilities. We urge critical infrastructure owners and operators to remove publicly exposed PLCs and other operational technology from the internet as soon as possible. We also encourage all organizations to review the latest guidance on CISA.gov and to report suspected incidents or anomalous activity to us for further support.”
A federal advisory calls on systems operators to remove
programmable logic controllers, known as PLCs, from direct internet exposure.
This is something Buhcan says Raleigh Water already does
“PLCs are used throughout plants today to operate valves,
chemical feeds, all sorts of things in a plant,” Buchan said. “Essentially, if
you absolutely had to, you could operate a plant form your house but of course we
don’t do that. Ours are not vulnerable in the same way that some of these other
ones were.”
Buchan says their systems went through a stress test last
year for during a simulated cyberattack done by the federal Cybersecurity
Infrastructure Security Agency
“They try to hack your system,” Buchan said. “It’s kind of a
trying experience because they’re very good at what they do.”
Raleigh Water navigated the test successfully
“We are in a very
secure position on that,” Buchan said. “This is something in the water industry
that has been talked about for quite some time now. I’m really very proud of
our team for taking that step without something like this in the news. They
recognize this is a potential issue. Let’s go ahead and be proactive and do
this ahead of time.”
But should something happen to Raleigh Water, its 670,000
customers can rest assured they can pivot quickly
“Operating a plant can still be done manually,” Buchan said.
“There are a lot of things today where that may not be the case. Or, it’s very
difficult to do so. But a water plant can be operated that way. So it’s
possible for some outage or disruption to happen. But our staff are very highly
trained and I think they could figure this out very quickly.”
