Onslow Water and Sewer Authority
- Event Year
- 2018
- Reliability
- Confirmed
- Country
- United States
- Industry
- Water/Waste Water
- Attack Type
- Targeted Attack
Description
In October 2018 Onslow Water and Sewer Authority (ONWASA) in North Carolina was hit by an Emotet infection that delivered Ryuk ransomware ten days later, encrypting the utility's databases and corporate systems. The incident occurred during recovery operations from Hurricane Florence.
Impact
Customer service, billing, email, and engineering systems were disrupted. The utility refused to pay the ransom and rebuilt systems from clean backups; water and sewer operations themselves remained unaffected because OT was segmented.
Sources
- A Review of Cybersecurity Incidents in the Water Sector - Journal of Environmental Engineering
Source list compiled from OTCAD (Stash Kempinski / Secura, GPL-3.0). Description is risidata's own prose.