OT, ICS & SCADA field guides · Water sector

Water & Wastewater OT Cybersecurity by Kai London

Water utilities run safety-critical process control across hundreds of unstaffed sites, often with a handful of engineers and a maintenance budget written before anyone said the word cyber. This field guide is written for that reality — practical control, proportionate cost, and a defensible answer for the regulator.

Available on Amazon.

What is inside

The water sector attack surface

Treatment control, pump and lift stations, telemetry links and the internet-facing exposure utilities rarely know they have.

Protecting the process

Chemical dosing, level and flow control, and the safety instrumentation that must remain independent of anything an attacker can reach.

Remote and unstaffed sites

Securing cellular and radio telemetry, local HMIs and physical access across a wide, thinly staffed geography.

Segmentation on a real budget

Practical zone and conduit design for utilities that cannot rebuild the network in one capital cycle.

Detection and response

Monitoring that suits small teams, plus incident and manual-operation plans operators can actually run at 3am.

Regulatory expectations

Evidencing controls and resilience to the bodies that oversee drinking water and essential services.

Who it is for: water and wastewater utility operators, OT and instrumentation engineers, utility CISOs and IT managers carrying OT accountability, and boards of regulated water companies.

IEC 62443NIST SP 800-82NIS2Purdue modelISO/IEC 27001

The process must stay safe even when the network is not. Design for the day the screens lie to you.

About the author

Professor Kai London — CISSP, CISM.

An internationally recognised cybersecurity executive, board advisor and Founder & CEO of Quantum AI Systems Security LLC, writing at the convergence of AI, governance and operational resilience. Honorary Professor and Researcher at UCL.