The Water and Wastewater Sector is a vital component of South Carolina's critical infrastructure that:
- Provides clean drinking water
- Manages wastewater
- Supports public health and economic stability
This sector faces cybersecurity threats that endanger its reliability and safety, including ransomware attacks, data breaches, and potential manipulation of control systems that could disrupt water treatment and distribution.
SC CIC collaborates with state agencies, private organizations, and state chapters of water associations to ensure that water and wastewater facilities have the resources necessary to train their personnel and secure their infrastructure. As part of this effort, SC CIC facilitated the 2024 Water Cyber War Games, an immersive exercise where participants responded to realistic scenarios to test their cyber incident response capabilities.
In partnership with the South Carolina Rural Water Association, SC CIC also led security awareness trainings, guiding participants through common tactics used by threat actors, recent incidents in the Water and Wastewater Sector, and the array of no-cost cybersecurity resources available through state and federal agencies, as well as the private sector. The Water and Wastewater Systems Sector is also one of the sectors that was selected for the SC CIC collaboration with the students at The Citadel, where a custom threat profile was created that identified and analyzed the specific threats the sector faces.
South Carolina’s efforts to strengthen the sector are further supported by federal partnerships with Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). By combining state-led initiatives with federal resources, South Carolina is working to ensure that its water and wastewater facilities have the tools and strategies needed to prevent, detect, and respond to potential cyber threats, safeguarding public health, agriculture, and essential services across the state.
