Water utilities in the United States have been dealing with cyberattacks that investigators suspect are linked to Iran. In response, some water companies are turning to volunteers, smaller security firms and an artificial intelligence project at Vanderbilt University, where researchers are building “digital twins” of water networks – software models of the real thing that let operators test what an attack would do without touching live equipment. Federal assistance programs have been cut back at the same time, so a lot of these operators are looking for help wherever they can find it.
That sounds a long way from a business in Sydney. The useful part is not the geopolitics. It is who got hit.
Water utilities are mostly small organisations. Plenty run on a handful of staff, ageing equipment and no dedicated IT person, let alone a security team. They were not picked because they were valuable. They were picked because they were reachable – something of theirs was exposed to the internet and not particularly well defended.
That is the same reason ordinary Australian small businesses get caught. Attackers scan broadly and cheaply. They are not researching you; they are looking for anything with a known weakness and a way in. Being small and unremarkable is not cover.
The practical response is unglamorous and mostly free:
- Find out what of yours is reachable from the internet – remote desktop, security cameras, a NAS, the router’s admin page. Most businesses have more exposed than they think.
- Change default passwords on every piece of equipment, especially anything installed by a contractor years ago.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication for email and remote access. This one step stops most account takeovers.
- Keep routers, firewalls and PCs patched. Retire gear the vendor no longer updates.
- Keep one backup offline, and actually test restoring from it.
None of that requires a security team. It requires someone to look once, then keep it tidy.
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