Draft Project Description for Securing Water and Wastewater Utilities: Cybersecurity for the Water and Wastewater Systems Sector
November 02, 2022

Seeking Feedback 

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has published for comment a draft project description, Securing Water and Wastewater Utilities: Cybersecurity for the Water and Wastewater Systems Sector. We are seeking feedback from all stakeholders in the water and wastewater utilities sector. In our efforts to ensure our guidance can benefit the broadest audience, the NCCOE is especially interested in hearing from water utilities of all sizes: small, medium and large. The public comment period is open until December 19, 2022.

Project Description

Many U.S. Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) sector stakeholders are utilizing data-enabled capabilities to improve utility management, operations, and service delivery. The increasing adoption of network-enabled technologies by the sector merits the development of best-practices, guidance, and solutions to ensure that the cybersecurity posture of facilities is safeguarded.

The NCCoE project will demonstrate solutions to protect the cybersecurity of infrastructure within the operating environments of WWS sector utilities that address common cybersecurity risks among water and wastewater systems utilities. This project will address areas that have been identified by WWS stakeholders, including: asset management, data integrity, remote access, and network segmentation. 

The NCCoE will demonstrate use of existing commercially available products to mitigate and manage these risks. The findings can be used as a starting point by utilities in mitigating cybersecurity risks for their specific production environment. This project will result in a freely available NIST Cybersecurity Practice Guide.

Submit Your Comments

The public comment period for this draft is open through December 19, 2022. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments.

We value and welcome your input and look forward to your comments.

Get Engaged

You can continue to help shape and contribute to this and future projects by joining the NCCoE’s Water Sector Community of Interest. Visit our project page to join.