The Biden administration is warning of potential cyberattacks on drinking water supplies in the United States.
The White House national security team specifically pointed out Iranian and Chinese hackers working to infiltrate vital infrastructure across the country. Theresa Payton, who served as the White House Chief Information Officer under President George W. Bush, spoke to KNX News about the threat.
She said people who run the nation’s water systems should already assume that hackers are in their networks. Payton said if hackers successfully get into infrastructure computer networks, they can cause massive chaos. Analysts said the nation’s drinking water systems are especially vulnerable because of outdated equipment, insufficient funding, and staffing shortages.
“I think for any organization, no amount of investment or preparation can really help you understand, until you live through an actual incident, how things are going to play out,” Payton said.
However, she said some precautions can be taken now to make sure water suppliers are ready to respond to an attack, like having an incident response playbook, rehearsing, and figuring out if or where any gaps can leave them vulnerable.
“I know a lot of times people will do a playbook and not realize how long it really takes to restore backup data from another location, and they underestimate that,” Payton said.
She said it’s also important to think about anything else that can be done with cybersecurity practices. Payton said that we’ve already seen how simple technology disruptions can have huge implications for other areas of our nation’s infrastructure.
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“Whether it's a social media platform has a technology glitch and goes down, a phone company, a cellular phone company has a technology glitch and a whole, you know, region of cell phone users can't use their cell phone and that's the only form of communication they have. We've seen where the airlines have had problems with air traffic control systems,” she said. “So we know that technology will fail us, and we know that when it does, it does create chaos and disruption.”
Payton said that the nation behind that attack might use it to send a message to the U.S. in response to sanctions or after a poor session at the negotiations table. But that party would need to be prepared for a massive response from the U.S.
“Here is the thing: if they are able to do it on a big enough scale to cause mayhem, attribution is challenging,” Payton said.
She said the question would then be how the country would respond to the attack.
“From an international perspective, we still have not hammered out in international accords around, you know, a strike against one country from a cyber incident perspective is considered a strike against, you know, all allied nations and what the repercussions are,” Payton said.
She said there tends to be a gray area as to what the appropriate level of response is if a nation is attacked digitally.
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