Fringe City Cyber Attack Discussion Topic: This defense in depth discussion scenario is an intentional cybersecurity attack on the water utility’s SCADA sy

Fringe City Cyber Attack Discussion Topic: This defense in depth discussion scenario is an intentional cybersecurity attack on the water utility’s SCADA system. It occurs during the fall after a dry summer in Fringe City. The water utility’s Information Technology (IT) person did not receive an expected pay raise and decides to reprogram the SCADA system to shut off the high-lift pumps. The operator’s familiarity with the SCADA system allows him to reprogram the alarms that typically notify operators of a high-lift pump failure. In addition, he prevents access to the SCADA system by others. A wildfire breaks out on the outskirts of the city. Please identify what type(s) of new countermeasures should have been implemented to prevent this cyber-attack from occurring. Question: 1) Discuss what type(s) of new countermeasures should have been implemented to prevent the cyber-attack described above from occurring. Be specific in recommending countermeasures for this scenario. Instructions: Need minimum 500 words Need 3 APA references No Plagiarism Please Need 3 Responses (Minimum 150 words for each) (Use uploaded document for responses) Topic:
This defense in depth discussion scenario is an intentional cybersecurity attack on the water
utility’s SCADA system. It occurs during the fall after a dry summer in Fringe City. The water
utility’s Information Technology (IT) person did not receive an expected pay raise and decides
to reprogram the SCADA system to shut off the high-lift pumps. The operator’s familiarity with
the SCADA system allows him to reprogram the alarms that typically notify operators of a highlift pump failure. In addition, he prevents access to the SCADA system by others. A wildfire
breaks out on the outskirts of the city. Please identify what type(s) of new countermeasures
should have been implemented to prevent this cyber-attack from occurring.
Question:
1) Discuss what type(s) of new countermeasures should have been implemented to prevent
the cyber-attack described above from occurring. Be specific in recommending
countermeasures for this scenario.
Instructions:
Need minimum 500 words
Need 3 APA references
No Plagiarism Please
Initial Post 1:
There are two major flaws in how Fringe City conducted its security policy for the SCADA
system that controlled water treatment. Based on the fact that one IT systems administrator
could reprogram a high-lift pump, implement that change, and then disable the alarms that
typically alert when pressure is either too high or too low, it’s clear that Fringe City failed to
implement a separation/segregation of duties principle and a dual control procedure for critical
systems.
Separation/segregation of duties is a core concept in information security. It means that
critical processes should require at least two steps before they are implemented. For example,
in a corporate office, one person may be responsible for approving budget requests while
another person may be responsible for actually making payments. That way it requires collusion
between both parties, and both parties committing gross negligence, for something bad to
happen. In this scenario, Fringe City should have had two separate IT positions: a programmer
who makes adjustments and changes to the system, and an administrator who administers the
system. Access controls (role-based) should be in place that prevent the administrator from
changing code. Also, the programmer should not be able to install new code into the system.
The second concept of dual control is also particularly important for critical systems
where loss of life can occur (such as the case with a large fire that can’t be fought adequately
because there’s no water pressure available for firefighters in Fringe City). If you’ve seen
Superman III, you’re already familiar with dual control. “Both keys at the same time!” In a dual
control system, no one operator can initiate a command or a process. Even though they are
performing the same step, it still requires two-person control. We use this in the Department of
Defense for certain classified functions quite often. In Fringe City, it should be required that two
people sign off on changing alarm statuses. If you want an alarm when water pressure hits 96
PSI on one sensor, instead of 120 PSI, then it should be required that two people sign in
independently within a specified time period (say 4 minutes) and make that change official.
It’s also possible that the IT person in this scenario was a known bad actor. Pre-employment
background checks are another great way to help prevent some of these types of situations.
Initial Post 2:
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are very important because of
their nature of providing automation in response to certain critical conditions. They not only
eliminate human errors but also automates common and tedious tasks to improve productivity
and management. Because of the critical nature of SCADA systems, it is important to implement
multiple layers of security to protect them from intruders. Amoroso, E. G. (2013, p. 142) stated
sometimes these multiple layers of security are maliciously bypassed by the trusted insiders. Like
in case of this discussion post, an unhappy employee purposely and maliciously reprogrammed
the SCADA system alarm and prevented others to access it. This is a serious offense and
organizations must ensure that defense in depth in place to protect critical national assets from
external as well as internal threats. Amoroso, E. G. (2013, p. 143) states that “Additional
functional controls on the local enterprise network are required to protect assets from insiders”.
Protecting national assets require implementation of multiple levels of authentication to
the system and proper access controls. As explained in the discussion requirements that the same
employee was not able to reprogram the alarm that notifies the operators of a high-lift pump
failure but also prevented access to the SCADA system by others. This could have been prevented
if separate authentication was required for alarm and administration. Access to setup critical
alarm setup should be done by a separate person and administering access to the critical system
should be managed by different people. One of the typical ways of separating access to separate
infrastructure operations is through the implementation of an internal firewall which will restrict
the employee to only assets he is authorized and given access to on the network.
Another measure that can be done to prevent internal threat is by implementing an
intrusion detection system. If a critical environment is manipulated from its standard operations
in any way, then it should inform the security teams immediately. For example, in our discussion
when an employee changed the SCADA alarm settings and access controls, immediately after
that a system alarm should have been sent to the security teams to verify what, who, and why
SCADA alarm and access controls have been altered. Nasr, P. M., & Varjani, A. Y. (2014) studied
the insider behavior in SCADA systems and provided a statistical approach to detect the
anomalies. They state that in order to detect anomaly in SCADA systems, it is not only enough to
ensure proper and well-known traffic goes through the network. It is also necessary to control
time periods, parameter values, command’s orders, and many more variables in order to detect
anomalous activity.
It is important to identify all entry points to access any critical national infrastructure. In
order to accomplish this, access controls and security measures need to be tested regularly.
Amoroso, E. G. (2013, p. 152) states that it is important to identify who can access what resources
and under which circumstances. Regular system security assessments need to be done to identify
any vulnerabilities and possible threats. Based on the assessment results, one of the mitigation
strategies for SCADA systems would be to implement sensors at different layers to not only warn
the security professionals but also setup emergency responses before the adversary penetrates
further.
Initial Post 3:
The issue of digital assaults in the water utility’s SCADA framework can be very affecting
during the time spent keeping up continuous administration. The digital assault is directed by the
programmers and this can intrude on the administration of water in the city. The digital assaults
in the SCADA framework can be more hazardous than those led in the PCs. To actualize the
countermeasures to the digital assault, the initial step that ought to have been connected is to
outline ebb and flow frameworks of the water framework (Lun et al., 2016). That is all the
equipment, programming and applications are required to be recorded. Alongside this,
documentation ought to be made on the general population who are approved to utilize the
separate frameworks. This will help in guaranteeing that the framework isn’t available by any
unapproved clients. The following procedure which ought to have been executed is checking of
the exercises of the representatives. Discovery control is likewise a significant advance which can
be additionally actualized. The following procedure which can be executed is organized division.
This will help in identifying the physical just as digital vulnerabilities. The safety efforts which can
be executed are a firewall and the application whitelisting (Case, 2016). The firewall ought to be
actualized and the firewall ought to be the advanced ones. VPN insurance ought to be likewise
executed and this will guarantee that the system of the SCADA can be shielded from the entrance
of the programmers.
Security checks or security review ought to be actualized during the time spent finding
the vulnerabilities in the system. Security reviews will help in distinguishing the provisos in the
system security and the vulnerabilities which can be gotten to by the programmers (Kizil and
Dogan, 2017). Hazard examination ought to have been led to recognize the dangers in the general
framework and this could have assisted the organization of the water utility framework with
identifying the dangers that would have brought about counteracting the digital assault in the
framework. This demonstrates the absence of anticipating the safety efforts of the organization.
In addition, with the assistance of hazard examination, the unexpected dangers could have been
relieved, and this could have anticipated the assault.

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