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CISA Alert: Water Sector PLC Targeting
- pudgywalsh 3mo agoSadly this instantly became a political football, with the states pointing fingers at Iran, but Trump was not wrong in this case. This is gross incompetence at all levels — IT malpractice if you will. CISA and its predecessors have been warning utility operators about critical infrastructure vulnerabilities for what, 15 years at this point? That goes back to the first Obama administration. Yet here we are in 2026 and these utilities are still connecting these things to the raw Internet with default passwords. You cross a threshold where you're being deliberately careless. When you are putting more effort into securing your Plex server on your home network then public utilities are taking on machinery that dumps chemicals into the local water, something is not right and finger-pointing isn't going to fix it.
- andyjohnson0 3mo ago> Yet here we are in 2026 and these utilities are still connecting these things to the raw Internet with default passwords. I work with PLCs. Default passwords of not, the idea that such weakly secure devices are being made accessible from the public internet boggles my mind.
- pudgywalsh 3mo agoYeah I meant the default passwords are simply the cherry on top of already egregiously poor security.
- fathermarz 3mo agoWhat industry? Very relevant.
- andyjohnson0 3mo agoNot utilities. And none of the PLCs I work with are internet-connected or unsecured.
- Avicebron 3mo agoI think it's less carelessness and more the inability to attract (pay) people who have the technical knowhow to properly secure infrastructure. Even a lot of developers are poor network engineers and treat IT like magic at their own companies.
- pudgywalsh 3mo agoI've met info-sec / vulnerability researcher types that were egregiously reckless, like plugging Raspberry Pi's into the production network kind of thing. Public sector has always paid low. But the problem is widespread, almost universal, and they've had a 15 year head start of the federal government telling them to get their shit together. At some point it just became standard industry practice is my guess.
- doobiedowner 3mo agoUpgrades to waste water are project based. Lowest bidder will not provide security for free. Security may be mentioned in spec but in hand waved language that can be hand waved away. That company doing the improvement project will have next to no documentation from the previous engineering effort. Just do bare minimum and move on to next job, because no one is getting paid enough to do put in more effort.
- antonymoose 3mo agoDepends on the firm. Quite many water companies handle their own engineering and only outsource when absolutely necessary, think speciality tunnel boring companies.
- elictronic 3mo agoIn all things when it fails in a drastic way the system will be corrected. People will die, it will suck, changes will be made. Government is supposed to respond to these things and create incentives to correct. Telling a small municipality to do something without a carrot ir stick does nothing. In this instance someone else will be providing the stick.
- idontwantthis 3mo agoUntil the people in charge face jailtime for hurting innocent people, why would they care? The government shouldn’t be warning, it should be ordering and imprisoning. And funding and educating where there are genuine gaps.
- lorreyfum 3mo agoAbsolutely 100% spot on. It’s not a political issue, it’s a technical issue. Disconnect them from the internet. Run your security patches. Check your logs. Water supplies are pretty important, do your job.
- throwaway894345 3mo agoKind of feels like national security is the job of the federal government. Seems fair to say the federal government should do their job. They started a war for no reason and failed to anticipate not only these infrastructure breach but also the closure of the Hormuz strait.
- pudgywalsh 3mo agoSo the federal government should be responsible for every rinky-dink water well in Bumblefuck, Minnesota? > failed to anticipate not only these infrastructure breach They've been warning them for close to two decades. Minnesota chose the path of no locks on their front doors and are now crying that someone walked in without knocking first.
- throwaway894345 3mo agoThe federal government makes sure everyone who sends a venmo for $60 pays taxes on it so yeah I think securing our national infrastructure is not an unreasonable expectation.
- zdragnar 3mo agoThere's no "national infrastructure" for water. Aside from what the EPA does, it isn't within the remit of the federal government to manage municipality water systems.
- throwaway894345 3mo agoMy wording was ambiguous. “national infrastructure” can refer to either the infrastructure in our nation or infrastructure managed by the federal government. I meant the former.
- cyanydeez 3mo agoa broken clock, yada yada.
- throwaway894345 3mo agoYes, utilities shouldn’t be negligent, but national security is 100% the federal government’s responsibility. If the vulnerabilities were so trivial, then it’s even more damning that the federal government was caught with its pants down, particularly since they were the only ones who knew they would be starting a war. > finger-pointing isn't going to fix it. Your entire comment was finger pointing…
- fathermarz 3mo agoThere are over 150k water utilities alone in the US. Passing the buck to the Federal Government is not understanding the problem.
- throwaway894345 3mo agoThere are 1000x as many tax payers and the government still makes sure every single mom who gets a venmo payment for $60 pays taxes. National security is a federal responsibility, they should absolutely do their jobs.
- anamax 3mo ago> There are 1000x as many tax payers and the government still makes sure every single mom who gets a venmo payment for $60 pays taxes. That's a join in an existing database. Where's the database and what's the code for this case?
- throwaway894345 3mo agoIs the idea that the federal government of the United States, which created and maintains a database of hundreds of millions of taxpayers, is powerless compile a database of 0.1% that number of water utilities? > What's the code for this case? Are you seriously asking me to provide a program?
- fathermarz 3mo ago
- AnimalMuppet 3mo ago"I blame it on Minnesota because they are grossly incompetent." "I think Minnesota is behind it." The first quote makes it the state's responsibility to secure local water systems, which I'm not sure that it is. The second makes it at least sound like the state of Minnesota is the entity running the attack on local water systems within their state, which is off in paranoid conspiracy territory. Trump was absolutely wrong.
- fathermarz 3mo agoNot IT malpractice and this where the industry diverges. IT folks usually don’t work on or understand these systems. Which is one of MANY problems OT faces. IT best practices don’t suffice in OT and even when they do, most of these orgs are too resource hamstrung to do anything about all of the fires they have to put out. Not to mention all of the OT vendors who flooded the market with tools instead of people being taught the boring process driven work.
- dylan604 3mo agoCISA was formed in 2018, so not quite 15 years but closer to half that. The security industry as a whole has been yelling for longer than 15 years about the vulnerability of utilities. They've been marked as soft targets before the Bush administration restructured the government.
- BlackRabbit1 3mo ago> Censys ARC identified 4,148 Internet-exposed hosts that respond to EtherNet/IP and self-identify as Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley. The United States remains dominant at 71.0% (2,945 hosts), with Canada a clear second at 11.5% (476 hosts). Describe the network security of the industrial automation industry and their customers in a single statement. Lol.
- tamimio 3mo agoIt’s far worse, just last week I was assessing some architecture and there’s still dial up and 3G connected devices in some of the most critical infrastructure around..
- fc417fc802 3mo agoI don't see the issue with either of those things? At least as long as they're properly secured. (Which they probably aren't but that's neither here nor there.)
- fathermarz 3mo agoWell I think it speaks to the age of the equipment they are speaking of in the industrial sector. How do you lockdown something that may have not been taken offline for decades because it will cost downtime or harm. Or something that can’t be locked down without tossing new tech around it that may not be compatible with the protocols etc.
- tamimio 3mo agoIt is an issue, dial up lacks tunnel encryption and if you managed to make it, it will be useless in real scenarios, and 3g is being phased out and obsolete
- fc417fc802 3mo agoSecure the contents of the tunnel and it doesn't matter. Provide a secure backbone and it doesn't matter. Realize that dialup is so slow that you can transparently tunnel it across ~any modern network (for which you can encrypt the tunnel) and it doesn't matter. Tunnel your dialup within your obsolete 3g network, and then tunnel that obsolete 3g network within something modern. The obsolete technologies are not the issue here. Also the thing about dialup is that it's point to point so the attack surface isn't even remotely comparable to exposing a port on the open internet. I should generally be able to trust the link that my phone company provides. Faxes are still used in many secure settings in preference to email.
- ilikeitdark13 3mo agoSome people allegedly say that the US should treat heads of companies like they do in China, when found guilty of certain crimes. Allegedly.
- fathermarz 3mo agohttps://www.linkedin.com/pulse/end-complacency-i-can-hope-andrew-krapf-yxwqe https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/end-complacency-i-can-hope-an... I much prefer the non-vendor perspective on this. Andy Krapf, co-chair of the Water ISAC, has a great breakdown about the status quo systemic problems that water faces today.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoEarlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135507
- dhx 3mo agoThere can be surprisingly few critical components and processes in a water and sewerage network due to gravity-fed designs (far more cost efficient), large buffers (water reservoirs, sewage sumps, etc) allowing intermittent operation of otherwise critical components, retained ability for humans to manually operate equipment, and also the fields of availability and safety engineering which typically prefer elimination of software failure modes by designing equipment to not rely upon software. The aim of a water network is to: 1. Take water from a water source (elevated dam -- strongly preferred, river, ocean) and as much as possible, gravity feed it to a treatment plant. 2. Treat the water using processes that are simplified/fail-safe as much as possible and could be operated manually by humans if necessary. This is where availability and safety engineers would design equipment to not be dependent on software and instead use mechanical or analogue electronics control. 3. Pre-position treated water as much as possible at ~50-90m hydraulic head (~500-900kPA) above the water faucets where people want to use the treated water and provide a buffer for X days of usage. Any pumps between the treatment plant and elevated storage therefore only need to operate intermittently to refill the buffer. Sewerage networks have similar aims: 1. Let sewage flow as much as possible downhill to the treatment plant via gravity. Where a rising main (elevation gain) is required, place a large enough sump for X hours/days of usage and pump up to higher elevation from the sump. 2. Treat the sewage using processes that are simplified/fail-safe as much as possible and could be operated manually by humans if necessary. For example, a compressor used for aeration can be manually switched on/off with a mechanical switch and plugged into a diesel generator, and not require someone logging in with multi-factor authentication to a laptop to issue a command to a PLC to turn on the compressor. 3. Design overflows into the system for emergency release of partially or untreated sewage, and practice this process as part of disaster recovery exercises. This is generally an aim arising due to risk assessment process that says building a $1bn sump with 8 independent pumps is cost prohibitive versus the 1-in-200 year chance of untreated sewage messing up a downstream river for a few weeks. Ultimately a lot of the cybersecurity risk comes down to government appetite to accept 1-in-1000 (or whatever) year failure modes. Is it worth investing now in triple modular redundant automated control systems (mostly used in safety-critical sectors such as aviation and space), or installing a just-in-case diesel generator at every one of 500 pumping stations across a region, or building $10bn of sewage sumps to hold sewage for up to a month, or building 2 treatment plants instead of 1 and using different technology for each, or hiring and training more humans to regularly exercise manual control and operation of a network, etc? Or just accept that once every 1000 years, some water rationing may be required, or a downstream river will be polluted for a few weeks?
- lorreyfum 3mo agoThe playbook, per federal officials, was crude but effective: attackers remotely accessed internet-facing operational technology, changed device IP addresses and passwords, and locked utility operators out of their own monitoring and control systems, NBC News reported. The PSA is now pleading with utilities to do the bare minimum - pull programmable logic controllers off the open internet and put them behind gateways and firewalls, use actual passwords, and restrict which devices are allowed to talk to one another.