Cybersecurity in the environmental protection field

At face value, there appears to be little overlap between cyber security and the environment. However, one case of this similarity is with water infrastructure. Distributing and controlling the water supply can rely on technology, which brings in potential tech risks and the nature of it being water itself lends itself to the environment. Cyber security should not just be related to the digital world. For more context, “According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), there are 153,000 different public drinking water infrastructure systems and 16,000 public waste water districts in the United States alone. Approximately 80 percent of US residents get drinking water from a public drinking water service, while about 75 percent of residents rely on municipal wastewater services.”

There is something called the National Critical Functions which are broken into four categories: connect, distribute, manage, supply. When applying this to infrastructure, certain things fall into these categories and they can become vulnerabilities for hackers to tamper with them.

There are a few reasons why it’s hard to make cybersecurity better for the environmental field. One reason is that although systems such as water and energy can be targets, in the past there hasn’t been too many cyber attacks related to them; for this reason, some feel that it’s not necessary to put in more effort into improving it. Another reason is that there needs to be more regulation in place.