Pablo Garcia Rodriguez

Mohammadhossein Homaei, Agustin Di Bartolo, Oscar Mogollon-Gutierrez et al.

Digital twins (DTs) help improve real-time monitoring and decision-making in water distribution systems. However, their connectivity makes them easy targets for cyberattacks such as scanning, denial-of-service (DoS), and unauthorized access. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that manage these systems often do not have enough budget or staff to build strong cybersecurity teams. To solve this problem, we present a Virtual Cybersecurity Department (VCD), an affordable and automated framework designed for SMEs. The VCD uses open-source tools like Zabbix for real-time monitoring, Suricata for network intrusion detection, Fail2Ban to block repeated login attempts, and simple firewall settings. To improve threat detection, we also add a machine-learning-based IDS trained on the OD-IDS2022 dataset using an improved ensemble model. This model detects cyber threats such as brute-force attacks, remote code execution (RCE), and network flooding, with 92\% accuracy and fewer false alarms. Our solution gives SMEs a practical and efficient way to secure water systems using low-cost and easy-to-manage tools.

Mohammadhossein Homaei, Mehran Tarif, Pablo Garcia Rodriguez et al.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) in water distribution and treatment face cyber-physical attacks exploiting network and physical vulnerabilities. Current water system anomaly detection methods rely on correlations, yielding high false alarms and poor root cause analysis. We propose a Causal Digital Twin (CDT) framework for water infrastructures, combining causal inference with digital twin modeling. CDT supports association for pattern detection, intervention for system response, and counterfactual analysis for water attack prevention. Evaluated on water-related datasets SWaT, WADI, and HAI, CDT shows 90.8\% compliance with physical constraints and structural Hamming distance 0.133 $\pm$ 0.02. F1-scores are $0.944 \pm 0.014$ (SWaT), $0.902 \pm 0.021$ (WADI), $0.923 \pm 0.018$ (HAI, $p<0.0024$). CDT reduces false positives by 74\%, achieves 78.4\% root cause accuracy, and enables counterfactual defenses reducing attack success by 73.2\%. Real-time performance at 3.2 ms latency ensures safe and interpretable operation for medium-scale water systems.