Page 41 - Cyber Warnings

The security of water supply systems

By Milica Djekic

The water supply systems are the part of critical infrastructure of every country. In case of the
system’s collapse or some terrorist operations – this sort of infrastructure may face on a serious
harm. Through this article, we intend to discuss how these systems may get secured and how
water supply facilities could get protected from the possible physical access bringing with
themselves biological, chemical or any other threats.

Also, it’s important to mention that any sort of cyber attacks could affect the water supply control
system causing the piping system pressure oscillations and breakdown of the water supply.

The danger of biological or chemical terrorism to water supply systems

The water supply systems would usually use the natural water resources being collected into
capacitors. Those capacitors would physically represent the water pools being created for water
cleaning and filtering. The final product is clean water that could get used for everyday needs
guaranteeing the certain level of quality.

Some people may use their own filters to produce the
better quality of water. It’s so risky if any threat would
physically access the water supply facilities and attempt
any sort of bio-terroristic attack or chemical diversion.

For such a scenario, we would recommend the better
physical security as well as some procedures that would
assure no access to unwanted visitors.

Those better procedures would include the best access
control that would allow only people being responsible for
maintaining the capacitors with the clean water to enter
such a room.

You always can hire some security professionals that
would do a check in of the people or rely on highly
sophisticated systems that would cover the RFID cards
and readers or any advanced technology such as a
fingerprint’s sensors or anything similar.

This sort of security could invoke the several levels of access control. The only drawback to this
solution is it’s digital, so it could easily get the target of hacker’s attacks.

41 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2016 Edition
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