Today, the Biden-Harris Administration announced it will extend the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Cybersecurity Initiative to the water sector. The Water Sector Action plan outlines surge actions that will take place over the next 100 days to improve the cybersecurity of the sector. The action plan was developed in close partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Water Sector Coordinating Council (WSCC).
The incidents at Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods, and other high-profile critical infrastructure providers are an important reminder that the federal government has limited authorities to set cybersecurity baselines for critical infrastructure and managing this risk requires partnership with the private sector and municipal owners and operators of that infrastructure. The Administration has already established ICS initiatives for the electric and natural gas pipeline subsectors, and today over 150 electricity utilities serving over 90 million residential customers and multiple critical natural gas pipelines have deployed or are in the process of deploying additional cybersecurity technologies.
The Water Sector Action Plan is a collaborative effort between the federal government and the critical infrastructure community to facilitate the deployment of technologies and systems that provide cyber-related threat visibility, indicators, detections, and warnings:
Efforts like this highlight cybersecurity as a top economic and national security priority for the Biden-Harris Administration:
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