Thursday, August 9, 2018

Zombie Sprinkler Systems Could Bring Down Municipal Water Systems

People and governments tend to think of attacks on the country's infrastructure as being a cyber attack on the power network or gas distribution system.

But, is there anything more critical to a community than lack of water?

Out here in the country, it isn't more than an annoyance. I have a spring, all my neighbors have wells. If the power fails and therefore our pumps, we all know where there is public water from roadside springs where anyone can fill up tanks.

But what if Punxy, with 10,000 people lost water? They would be in desperate need, no drinking, cooking, bathing, or sewer service.

Now, what if it were Pittsburgh, or another city with lots of suburbs all using the same water system?

That would be a major disaster and if every sprinkler system in the area around Pittsburgh were turned on at once, it could empty the water towers and ready reserves in a few hours. Sure there would still be reservoirs but the system of any big city relies on local storage because of the sheer volume.

"The researchers from Ben-Gurion University found security weaknesses in popular commercial irrigation systems that could allow hackers to turn them on and off remotely. Bad guys could trick them into watering by feeding the web-connected gadgets fake commands directly, or by serving up bogus weather data."

Piping Botnet - Turning Green Technology into a Water Disaster
https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.02131

Smart commercial irrigation systems such as RainMachine, BlueSpray, and GreenIQ can be detected on a network server in 10-15 minutes - then they can be taken over and all turned on at once.

The usual demand storage system is the water tower and it is easy to determine that fewer than 1500 sprinkler systems can empty such a tower in 8 hours, mostly unnoticed if it is done at night.

Even an emergency reservoir can be emptied in 8-10 hours by turning on 24,000 sprinkler systems.

What if Russia or China, or even a tiny country attacked the U.S. (or other advanced countries, or even several of the G7 simultaneously) attacked power networks and sprinkler systems and sewage systems all at the same time?



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