Cyber Threat Modeling for Water and Wastewater Systems: Contextualizing STRIDE and DREAD with the Current Cyber Threat Landscape

Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) are integral to maintaining public health and safety, with numerous other infrastructure sectors also being reliant upon the services WWS provides. Given these dependencies and how critical WWS is to public health and safety, it is integral to understand all possible threats. As water and wastewater infrastructure increases the integration of cyber systems in its infrastructure, the threat posed by malicious cyber threat actors (CTAs) and the risk of cyberattacks has increased concurrently. The growing attack surface of water systems has been targeted in various ways in the past, including the release of wastewater by an insider threat, gaining remote access to a dam’s SCADA network by state-backed hackers, and installing malware on water systems by cybercriminals. Such incidents show how industrial control system networks in critical water infrastructure require attention. This paper provides an analysis of the WWS threat landscape, benchmarking with the 22 incidents that occurred from 2000 to 2023.