Water Facilities Cyber Incident
We Need Digital Twins
I’ve been told more than once to focus my digital twin presentations on IT because “no one cares about OT.” I focused on both, in my book too. This week is why. Water is life...
Coordinated cyberattacks hit water utilities across at least 7 US states. 30+ communities were disrupted — one plant went offline, others disconnected equipment and switched to manual operations. The FBI confirmed the attacks are spreading.
The likely path: internet-exposed PLCs connected via cellular modems, accessed using legitimate vendor engineering tools. Attackers modified controller logic, altered what operators saw on SCADA displays, and changed passwords to lock them out. No need to breach the corporate network — the field devices were directly reachable.
An AI-powered digital twin addresses this at multiple layers. It maintains a live knowledge graph of every asset, connection, and trust boundary — so an internet-exposed PLC isn’t an unknown risk, it’s a tagged, flagged, governed node. It detects anomalous telemetry patterns before operators are locked out. It computes blast radius: if this controller is compromised, what’s downstream? And it gives operators a simulation-backed response playbook rather than improvisation under pressure.
This is what our current work models— AI-powered digital twins for water system cybersecurity.
AI-Powered Digital Twins (Wiley, 2026)
