Cyber defenses for US drinking water supplies are “absolutely inadequate” and vulnerable to large-scale disruption by hackers, a senior official said Thursday. There’s also a hurdle in the sheer number of different water providers — about 150,000 systems serving 300 million Americans, the official said. “These processes — I want to underscore this point — could all be vulnerable to cyberattacks, which could disable or manipulate monitoring control systems,” the official said. “We’re particularly concerned that a cyberattack could be carried out, for example, to manipulate treatment processes to produce unsafe water. Also to damage water infrastructure or even to stop the flow of water,” the official said.

Source: The Guardian January 27, 2022 15:02 UTC