There will be a cybersecurity project that will assist small water utilities in America cope with cyber attacks. The Water Watch Center, which was unveiled by DEF CON Franklin and the National Rural Water Association (NRWA), will ensure that rural water systems have cybersecurity services that some of them cannot afford on their own.

Water Utilities Face Growing Cybersecurity Pressure

The programme was launched during DEF CON convention in Las Vegas amid fears over a potential large-scale nation-state cyber attack against water systems of the United States.

The organizations have not revealed which systems were involved, how the attacks took place, or what was the timing and impact of the alleged Iranian incident. They also have not revealed which government organization claimed responsibility for the attack. Rather, the program is centered on boosting cybersecurity in utility systems which lack resources.

The necessity is evident since water systems that serve less than 10,000 people comprise 91% of some 50,000 community water systems in the country.

Five Cybersecurity Providers Join Initial Programme

The Water Watch Center will partner with five Managed Detection & Response providers namely: Defendify, Legato Security, L1 Secure, Rapid7 and Sentinel Technologies.

The partners will share the threats via a collaboration platform and NRWA will be the information center for the whole nation. There are no technical specifics on how information will be shared between partners and how the alerts and incident notifications will be organized in the press release.

Co-founder of DEF CON Franklin, Jake Braun stated that the chosen partners already know the security needs of the water utilities. In addition, volunteers from DEF CON Franklin will help to reduce costs for underfunded systems.

Programme Builds on Two Years of Volunteer Work

The DEF CON Franklin program has been running for two years and has recruited nearly 450 cybersecurity volunteers and paired them with water and wastewater utilities in Arizona, Indiana, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming.

It was discovered that there was an even bigger problem: getting cybersecurity help to about 150,000 water and wastewater utilities.

The Water Watch Center is collaborating with Cyber Maryland to connect with rural utilities in Maryland. National security experts underscored the significance of water infrastructures.

Digital Twins Will Support Cybersecurity Testing

Vanderbilt University is participating in this project by using research related to DARPA’s Cyber Agents for Security Testing and Learning Environment project.

The plan is to design digital twins of selected water and wastewater facilities. Red and blue team automated cyber agents can then be employed to attack and defend the system in a controlled environment.

It is hoped that the digital environments can assist in improving the cybersecurity technology before its deployment in the actual water facilities.

The program also has backing from Craig Newmark and other philanthropies and governments. The immediate objective of the program is to provide managed cybersecurity services to small water utilities while working towards long-term strategies.