Water Utilities at Risk Due to Flaws in Smart Irrigation Systems

New research reveals that water utilities are at risk of getting hacked due to vulnerabilities in smart irrigation systems.  Basically, smart irrigation systems, by virtue of their perpetual connection to the internet, can easily be accessed by botnets for malicious purposes.

How Smart Irrigation System Attacks Can Compromise Water Systems

The research argues that smart irrigation systems could open a back door that allows malicious botnets to cripple local water systems.  Specifically, a hacker could trigger all the irrigation systems in a local area to start operating at the same time, thereby creating a spike in water usage and depleting supply such that it could cripple water utilities’ ability to deliver drinking water to homes.

This, in turn, could lead to an emptying of water reserves and, in the worst-case scenario, a compete depletion of the local water supply.  According to the research, a water tower can be completely drained in less than an hour, and this would only take a botnet infecting less than 1,500 irrigation systems.  Yikes!  To learn more about the nuts and bolts of how this could happen, click here.

Folks, this is extremely scary stuff!  It is yet another example of how smart systems that rely on IoT can be compromised to deploy large scale attacks. We have already concluded that Russian hackers have compromised the US electric grid.   Imagine a scenario where electric, gas, and water infrastructure is brought down at the same time via an orchestrated attack.  Definitely not a pretty picture.

The bottom line is that water utilities must take this threat seriously.  As such, they should identify ways to systemically stem the risk, and incorporate these types of scenarios into exercise and drills.  Electric utilities are already struggling with this new normal of the heighted risk of system hacking, and now it appears as though the water industry is seeing a rapid increase in its own cyber risk profile as well.