Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, N.C.

Cape Fear Public Utility Authority (CFPUA) serves the City of Wilmington and the majority of New Hanover County, N.C. It has a robust Information Technology (IT) division, but before the utility joined WaterISAC and began using Perch Security, it was concerned about how to best manage a growing volume of potential cyber threats.

Through a partnership with WaterISAC, Perch Security continuously monitors water systems' IT and operational technology (OT) networks for potential cyber threats, comparing network traffic against indicators in WaterISAC’s extensive threat repository. Perch’s dedicated security operations center evaluates detected threats and notifies members to take corrective action on validated malicious activity.

Having this additional set of eyes looking at our traffic for potential threats became extremely valuable. At that time, our organization had limited staff to focus solely on cyber security, and we lacked the dedicated resources to identify, isolate, remediate, and then warn others about potential threats. Perch allowed us to not only be informed, but quickly respond to those identified threats and then automatically warn others within the participating Perch community.

- Eric Hatcher, CFPUA security and emergency manager.

Through its membership with WaterISAC, CFPUA learned about other industry security related services, such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cybersecurity self-assessment tool, and other free DHS cyber assessment services. “These services provided us with tools that helped us establish an industry specific security standard and demonstrate how we were, or were not, meeting those defined best practices,” Hatcher said.