Water Simulation Packages (WSP)

According to the New York Sun “New York City’s water supply could be the target of contamination if a water system map made its way into the wrong hands…”

New York City’s water supply could be the target of contamination if a water system map made its way into the wrong hands, an environmentalist said.

The threat has arisen since someone broke into a vehicle belonging to a Department of Environmental Protection maintenance supervisor and stole an agency laptop containing a map of the water system. If the map was detailed enough,”there could be the opportunity to pose a threat,” the executive director for the Center for Environmental Information, Cindy Stachowski, said. Even without a map, Ms. Stachowski added, someone pouring biological, chemical, or radiological contaminants into a fresh water source could adulterate the water system.

Source: The New York Sun

InfraGard 2005 National Conference (hosted by the InfraGard National Members Alliance and the FBI) has a track called “Taking Aim at Our Nation’s Drinking Water”:

Track Overview
As security tightens around airports and other facilities, terrorists are acquiring targets that are easier to reach. These easier to reach targets are called “soft targets” because of their relaxed security, easy access, critical nature to our nations well-being, and, when struck, create fear and paralyze large groups of people.

Drinking water is the ultimate soft target. It is a necessity of life. It is a critical and emotionally-charged component of our nation’s infrastructure. Drinking water is easily accessible with security being erratic to non-existent. Additionally, drinking water and its distribution systems are acutely susceptible to widespread contamination by readily available nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

Consciously-contaminated drinking water will, at a minimum, cause the economy to stall, stop business activities and transportation, close schools and churches, interrupt governmental affairs, destroy the public’s trust in their public officials, and negatively-impact source water supplies (aquifers, reservoirs, lakes, and rivers). The aftermath of a single event is expected to cost billions of dollars.

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Water security at InfraGard 2005

News and opinion on best practices, future trends, security standards, vendor offerings, and all other issues related to SCADA security.

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“With financial help from the Pentagon, Israeli scientists develop a means for identifying any kind of water contamination. The well-equipped Israeli defense establishment may receive a significant addition by the end of the year - an artificial tongue.

Teams of scientists at three of Israel’s universities - Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University - have overcome a hurdle that was considered impossible to conquer and developed an apparatus capable of identifying every kind of water contamination.”

See the full story at haaretz.com.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Water utilities have installed computer-based remote controls “with little attention paid to security,” leaving valves, pumps and chemical mixers for water supplies vulnerable to cyber-attack, according to an Environmental Protection Agency report.

See full story at insecure.org

“Water Supply Systems Security” by Larry Mays (editor) is actually a collection of articles covering a wide area of the security issue. This book deals with vulnerability assessment, cyber threats, early warning systems, security hardware, reliability, remote monitoring and more. About half of the 18 chapters in the book were written by people from the academia while the other by engineers and private consultants. This makes the book a nice blend between theory and practice.

Two chapters were of special interest. The first, “Cyber Threats and IT/SCADA Systems Vulnerability”, gives an overview of water utilities computer systems and their vulnerability, typical attack scenarios and methods for mitigating such attacks. The second, “Reconstruction Historical Contamination Events”, describes historical events and the way these events were modeled.

For more information see this book’s listing at Amazon.com

By Avi Ostfeld and Elad Salomons

Abstract:Deliberate contamination is generally viewed as the most serious potential terrorist threat to water systems.Chemical or biological agents could spread throughout a distribution system and result in sickness or death among the people drinking the water.Since September 11,2001 the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency’s water protection task force and regional offices have initiated massive actions to improve the security of the drinking water infrastructure.A methodology is presented for finding the optimal layout of an early warning detection system ~EWDS!.The detection system is comprised of a set of monitoring stations aimed at capturing deliberate external terrorist hazard intrusions through water distribution system nodes—sources,tanks,and consumers.The optimization considers extended period unsteady hydraulics and water quality conditions for a given defensive level of service to the public,defined as a maximum volume of polluted water exposure at a concentration higher than a minimum hazard level.Such a scheme provides an EWDS for a deliberate terrorist external hazard intrusion,as well as for accidental contamination entries under unsteady conditions—a problem that currently has not been solved.The methodology is cast in a genetic algorithm framework for integration with EPANET and is demonstrated through two example applications.

Full paper