Alpena Township board tables SCADA upgrade after July cyberattack
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ALPENA - The Alpena Township Board of Trustees voted during Monday’s monthly meeting to table a $14,495 plan to replace cellular equipment on its water-system control network until September, after a July cyberattack disrupted remote monitoring used by the township's contractor and by other utilities across Michigan.
Township Supervisor Abbi Kaszubowski said the delay is to gather more information.
"It's tabled till September but it's always possible we could add it to the agenda if we needed to have a special meeting," she said.
The work would be done by UIS SCADA Inc. of Dexter. UIS is Utilities Instrumentation Service, a Michigan firm that installs industrial monitoring systems. SCADA, or supervisory control and data acquisition, is the software and radio or cellular network that lets operators watch pumps, tanks and sewer stations from a computer instead of driving to every site.
Small industrial computers called programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, sit at wells, booster stations and lift stations. They send tank levels, pump status and alarms over cellular modems to a central program. In some places the same link can also change settings, such as how hard a booster pump should run.
Alpena Township uses UIS's CRUiSE cloud platform. An Aug. 5 quote from estimator Ken Wesley covers 15 Pepwave 4G cellular modems with firewalls and IP whitelisting, meaning only approved computer addresses can reach the equipment, plus a new antenna and cables at each site, programming and startup. The quote was valid for 30 days.
The township system is used mainly for monitoring, not to run a treatment plant. F&V Operations and Resource Management ( FVOP), contracts with the township and operates the township's water and sewer systems. FVOP still had to reprogram PLCs at multiple sites so they could reconnect after the incident.
"Following the recent cyberattack, updating the SCADA system is essential to close known vulnerabilities, strengthen defenses, and prevent a similar disruption from happening again," Kaszubowski said.
Catherine Winn, an FVOP regional manager, notified township officials on Aug. 5 that UIS's platform had been hacked, remote monitoring was lost, and systems whose SCADA controls were tied to treatment operations were more seriously affected. Alpena Township was not hit to that extent, she said. She warned that the water booster pump station on M-32 has pump setpoints that can be changed through SCADA and that a bad actor could affect water distribution.
UIS told customers the July 27 incident involved PLCs and the communications that support the platform. IT Director Brian Davis wrote on July 29 that older modems cannot support the new security measures, and some hardware must be replaced. UIS said it is working with the Michigan State Police; the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI; and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, the state agency that oversees drinking water and wastewater.
The local upgrade sits inside a national campaign. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA (the Homeland Security office that helps protect water plants, power grids and other critical systems) said in an article published by Tech Crunch, it saw malicious activity in July against more than 100 internet-exposed U.S. water and wastewater systems, often through PLCs connected directly to cellular modems. The FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, said utilities in at least seven states reported incidents after July 27, and some activity degraded monitoring or pressure.
According to information published by The Detroit News, EGLE said nine Michigan municipal water systems reported activity consistent with those warnings. Spokesman Dale George said the systems kept operating safely, operators addressed the issues, and there were no known public-health impacts. The nine systems have not been named. Alpena uses a different SCADA contractor at its treatment plants.