Tech on Tap: AI and water sustainability

In today's talk, we will be discussing the rising trend of water and cyber security issues. There has been an increasing number of cyber attacks on water treatment facilities, water supply systems in the United States and around the world. And the Department of Homeland Security have recently assigned the water treatment facilities as one of the main 16 infrastructures in the country that are heavily being targeted constantly by adversaries, state, non state adversaries and in a way that impacts public health impacts water quality. Most I guess citizens, most policymakers do not think of the those critical infrastructures as targets of cybersecurity attacks. We always think of cybersecurity, uh malware attacks, ransomware attacks, viruses on computers but very rarely, we think of the attacks on biological systems and how they, how how that can have a bigger impact on our, on our health and more direct impact and and a different form of impact. The goal is to raise awareness and kind of spread the word. But the work that we're doing at Virginia Tech and at the A3 Lab to target those forms of attacks and really Virginia Tech is is leading in this domain. We coined one of the terms that's now being used by the community. Instead of saying cyber security, we refer to it as cyber biosecurity to indicate that this is not the conventional cyber security form of attacks. It's focused on biological systems. I think events like this help foster a community of knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer and have us collectively think about problems that we all care about and make, you know, this place a state in the country and even the world a much better place.