How Honeywell Helped Protect The Water Supply For 42,080 Americans In The City Of Hutchinson, Kansas
THE CHALLENGE
The city of Hutchinson needed to ensure the safety of their residents and the environment as well as the resiliency and dependability of their critical water and wastewater systems. They needed to centrally manage all their assets dispersed throughout the city. They also needed visibility into their OT networks to look for vulnerabilities, determine if anyone from the outside was trying to access their network and monitor other potential threats to their OT network and industrial control systems.
THE OUTCOME
The city of Hutchinson gained centralized management of all water and wastewater assets and full visibility into their OT network. They also achieved detailed asset monitoring, remote access security and continuous threat detection all while receiving collaborative support from OT security specialist. This tool helped the city significantly reduce their risk on multiple networks and improve the security for their water supply and wastewater treatment services for their residents.
Headquarters
Hutchinson, Kansas
Industry
Water / Wastewater
Sector
Critical Infrastructure
Population
42,080
EVALUATING THE CITY OF HUTCHINSON’S CYBERSECURITY CHALLENGES
Hutchinson is the largest city in Reno County, Kansas, United States. Serving 42,080 residents, their water production and treatment divisions operate and maintain a reverse osmosis (RO) water treatment center, 20 water wells, 2 booster pump stations, 4 water storage towers, 2 Class I disposal wells, and all the groundwater remediation facilities.
The city also has a water maintenance division, a sewer maintenance division and a wastewater treatment facility which treats approximately 5 million gallons a day of domestic and industrial wastewater. Securing all water operations in an entire city is a very complex task since the city's assets are dispersed and their teams are siloed.
First, the water wells, pump stations, wastewater treatment facilities, and RO (reverse osmosis) plants are dispersed throughout the city, so all systems need to be centrally managed. Second, facing the rising threat of cyberattacks against US water treatment systems, the city must remove vulnerable entry points and demonstrate their system is resilient against attack. To do this, they need full visibility into communications throughout the network and must ensure only authorized personnel can access the control system.
HPS_TS
HPS_TS, HPS, Customer
HPS
HPS, Customer
"If it wasn’t for Cyber Insights, we would not have known of those remote access connections, since we thought we had our firewalls set up correctly, but Cyber Insights was able to surface that traffic and help us keep intruders out.”
NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR
FINDING THE RIGHT SOLUTION
The City of Hutchinson worked with their automation partner to implement a system that could monitor critical IT and OT systems on the water production and treatment networks. During the initial assessment Honeywell reviewed the city’s overall cybersecurity posture and ability to predict, prevent, and respond to ever-changing cyber threats. Seeing an opportunity to consolidate all their IT and OT system data into one platform while simultaneously improving their security strength, the city of Hutchinson engaged the automation partner for a proof of concept using Honeywell Forge Cybersecurity+ | Cyber Insights.
Cyber Insights was installed and was able to immediately surface anomalous activities. Multiple unauthorized remote desktop protocol (RDP) connection attempts were detected. Computers from outside the network were attempting to make remote connections to systems inside the OT network, even though such attempts should have been stopped by the city’s firewall. The City of Hutchinson's security team immediately implemented explicit firewall rules to block RDP traffic, keeping those intruders out of the network.
ABOUT HONEYWELL OT CYBERSECURITY
Honeywell offers OT Cybersecurity solutions that are designed to help customers better protect industrial and building assets, operations and people from digital-age threats. With more than 25 years of OT cybersecurity experience and more than 100 years of control industry domain experience, Honeywell combines proven cybersecurity technology and industrial know-how to help customers maximize productivity, improve reliability and increase safety.
We provide innovative cybersecurity software, services and solutions that are designed to help customers better protect assets, operations and people at industrial and critical infrastructure facilities around the world. Our state-of-the-art Cybersecurity Centers of Excellence allow customers to safely simulate, validate and accelerate their industrial cybersecurity initiatives.
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