ECHO Early Warning System for Water Infrastructure Protection

Abstract

Water is a valuable natural resource and essential for human life, so protecting critical water infrastructure is vital. Through directives such as the Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2), the European Union has made it mandatory to ensure that all critical infrastructure is adequately protected. Security measures taken to protect critical infrastructure are often limited to a national scope. The ECHO Early Warning System (E-EWS) is a tool that enables communication and cooperation across national borders. It focuses on a warning system that allows people to know almost immediately what is happening, to react appropriately and to disseminate this information to trusted partners. With geopolitical tensions and cyberattacks on the rise, this work in progress employs a literature review and case analysis to identify similarities between recent cyberattacks on critical water infrastructure and to determine what E-EWS could have done in these instances. The results show that key similarities correlate with current events: political threat actors, slow detection, fear as a weapon, information silos and people as weak links. With the E-EWS, threats are detected almost immediately, allowing mitigation actions to begin much earlier. By sharing information, knowledge grows, connecting and strengthening the overall security of E-EWS users. Attackers do not care about borders, so the cybersecurity of critical water infrastructure is no longer limited to national borders. International cooperation would help reduce the burden caused by some countries’ own resource constraints. Based on these results, the E-EWS plays a key role in the future protection of EU critical water infrastructure.