# Water-Tight IoT-Just Add Security
## 4 Case Study of a Typical IoT Solution
### The Operational Impact of Those Attacks on This Solution  
From a water engineering point of view, the impact of the described hack on the discussed IoT device can result in severe environmental consequences. The considered device has been developed within the DWC project as a solution to remotely inform water utilities about Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs), which should be limited over time to preserve the surrounding environment because of the potential releases of polluted discharge.  
Combined sewer systems are designed to overflow occasionally during heavy rainfalls leading to untreated wastewater discharge into nearby receiving water bodies, eventually resulting in significant public health concerns, stress on aquatic organisms, and water quality concerns [23]. Several studies [24, 25, 26, 27, 28] have largely shown that frequent CSOs can lead to environmental severe issues such as high concentrations of solids, microbial pathogens and toxic pollutants in receiving water bodies.  
The hydraulic devices which are designed to handle CSOs should meet specific criteria, which often depend on national or international regulations. Usually, CSOs devices must discharge the wastewater flow while being compliant to specific restrictions, such as limited yearly frequencies and sufficient dilution between wastewater and rainwater [29].  
Having control of the several CSO devices over time has usually been an issue for water utilities because of the significant high costs of the installation and maintenance of flow and water level meters that are installed remotely at the location of the CSO devices along the whole combined sewer networks. Moreover, climate change is nowadays eventually worsening the level of compliance of existing CSO devices around our planet, in terms of frequency of CSO occurrences [30]. In the past, CSO chambers and pipes have often been designed without considering the actual status of current and foreseen climate change, while accounting only for the historical precipitation data of the involved territory. The analyzed IoT device has been developed in the DWC project with the aim of providing the water utilities with a low-cost solution which allows them to monitor the frequency of CSOs by adopting real-time surrogate temperature sensors, among the cheapest sensors on the market.  
When the water level is sufficient enough to overflow from a CSO device, an alarm is registered by the IoT device because of a significant difference in temperature between the external environment and the discharged wastewater. If anomalies of temperature are detected by the analyzed IoT device, a message is remotely sent to the operators of the water utility to inform them about the critical situation of a given CSO device. When this digital solution is properly installed on a significant number of CSO chambers or pipes in a given sewer network, the interested water utility can benefit from the transmitted information to improve CSOs management. Specifically, sensors are coupled to wireless communication and cloud data transmission through state-of-the-art data-shared platforms to allow online visualization and data processing. Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics techniques have been developed to extract accurate real-time knowledge from the raw temperature measurements and define user-friendly set rules for optimal CSO prevention. Additionally, the interested water utility can rely on the obtained overview of CSOs devices concerning the identification task of the most critical areas which should be revamped accordingly with data-driven master plans aimed at network rehabilitation.  
Overall, the rapid growth of IoT devices in the water industry is allowing an outstanding improvement of process effectiveness in existing water systems. On the other hand, water utilities increasingly rely on a variety of digital solutions which are normally susceptible to different types of hacking, hence the related IT protection from malicious attackers is paramount to avoid environmental and/or social disasters.