Critical Infrastructure's Security Through Obscurity Is a Fatal Delusion

Source: Dev.to

The Romanian Waters Ransomware Attack – A Wake‑Up Call for All Critical‑Infrastructure Operators

The weekend ransomware attack on Romanian Waters should terrify every infrastructure operator in the world, not because of what happened, but because of how predictably it happened.

• 1,000 compromised systems
• Regional offices taken offline
• BitLocker weaponised against the very organisation it was meant to protect
• Romania’s national cybersecurity system was not even protecting its water authority before the attack

This is security‑through‑obscurity failing in real‑time, and we’re calling it “acceptable” because “the water kept flowing.”

Why the Traditional “Isolation & Obscurity” Model Fails

The conventional wisdom in critical‑infrastructure protection has been:

1. Keep systems air‑gapped
2. Don’t connect OT to corporate networks
3. Trust that obscurity provides security

The Romanian water attack—along with dozens of similar incidents across power grids, hospitals, and utilities—proves this approach doesn’t just fail occasionally. It fails systematically, predictably, and catastrophically.

What the attackers did

• Compromised 1,000 systems across 11 regional offices without anyone noticing until the ransom note appeared.
• Lateral movement spanned:
  • Geographic Information Systems (GIS) servers
  • Databases
  • Email & web services
  • Windows workstations
  • Domain Name Servers (DNS)

If attackers can move laterally through that much of your enterprise network undetected, the idea that your OT systems are truly isolated is fantasy.

The Myth of the Air Gap

Critical‑infrastructure operators cannot truly operate in isolation. They need:

• Weather data for flood predictions
• Environmental monitoring for safety compliance
• Maintenance‑scheduling systems
• Supply‑chain coordination tools
• Financial systems for billing & procurement

Each connection point becomes a potential bridge between the “isolated” OT environment and the compromised corporate network.

Typical attack pattern

1. Initial compromise – phishing, unpatched software, credential theft
2. Lateral movement – exploiting inadequate network segmentation
3. Reach operational systems – which were never designed to resist a determined adversary

In the Romanian case, the attackers stopped at corporate systems not because OT security was superior, but because they had already achieved maximum disruption for maximum ransom without needing to go further.

The Real Problem: Security‑Through‑Obscurity

• The water authority was not integrated into the national cybersecurity system before the attack.
• This isn’t an oversight; it’s the logical endpoint of a model that assumes threats won’t find you.

If your security model assumes threats won’t find you, why invest in monitoring, detection, or response capabilities?

The dangerous feedback loop

1. No attack → assume you’re safe
2. No monitoring → you wouldn’t know if an attack were happening

Attackers may have maintained persistence for weeks or months before deploying ransomware. Without comprehensive monitoring, no one would know.

From Obscurity to Transparency

Security through obscurity has morphed into security through wishful thinking. Operators convince themselves that their systems are:

• Too specialised
• Too isolated
• Too uninteresting for sophisticated attackers

Meanwhile, ransomware groups are professionalising:

• Developing tactics for industrial control systems (ICS)
• Building relationships with nation‑state actors with geopolitical motives

The result: more connected, more vulnerable infrastructure.

A New Paradigm: Radically Transparent Security

The alternative isn’t more isolation; it’s AI‑powered, continuous monitoring that assumes breach is inevitable.

What transparent security looks like

• Instrument every system – log all communications, configuration changes, authentication attempts.
• Analyze & correlate in real‑time – use AI/ML to detect anomalies across IT and OT.
• Cost‑effective – the expense of comprehensive monitoring is a fraction of a single successful attack.

AI‑powered capabilities

• Behavioral baselines for industrial systems
• Detection of lateral movement before ransomware deployment
• Identification of anomalous network traffic, unusual system calls, suspicious credential usage
• Highlighting low‑level persistence that human analysts often miss

Transparency Drives Accountability

When regulators and security agencies can see an operator’s security posture:

• Operators invest in real security, not security theatre.
• The Romanian water authority is now being integrated into national protective systems—not because of new regulations, but because the attack made the gaps impossible to ignore.

Extending visibility

• Threat‑intelligence sharing: aggregate anonymised attack patterns across critical sectors.
• Treat each infrastructure operator not as an island, but as part of a connected ecosystem.

Takeaway

The Romanian Waters incident shows that obscurity is not security. The only way to protect critical infrastructure is to embrace transparent, AI‑driven monitoring, break down silos, and share intelligence across sectors. The cost of doing so is tiny compared with the devastation of a successful ransomware attack.

In Texas, water utilities in Romania should receive relevant threat intelligence within hours, not months.

AI‑powered security monitoring solves the fundamental problem that makes security through obscurity tempting: the overwhelming complexity of modern infrastructure systems. Human analysts can’t possibly monitor every system interaction in a network spanning thousands of components across geographic regions. AI systems can.

Machine‑learning models trained on infrastructure‑specific data can detect attack patterns that traditional signature‑based systems miss. When attackers use legitimate tools like BitLocker for malicious purposes, AI systems can identify the behavioral context that distinguishes legitimate encryption from ransomware deployment. When threat actors perform reconnaissance by querying Active Directory or mapping network topology, AI systems can correlate these activities with broader attack patterns.

Most importantly, AI monitoring scales with infrastructure complexity. As systems become more interconnected, AI models become more effective at identifying anomalous patterns across the entire network. Security through obscurity becomes weaker as systems grow more complex, AI monitoring becomes stronger.

The Romanian attack demonstrates another critical advantage: AI systems don’t take weekends off. The ransomware was deployed over a weekend, when human monitoring is typically reduced. AI‑powered detection would have identified the attack in progress, potentially enabling response before widespread system encryption occurred.

Critics of transparent infrastructure security raise legitimate concerns about creating new attack surfaces. Comprehensive monitoring requires network instrumentation that could itself be compromised. Centralized threat‑intelligence sharing creates attractive targets for nation‑state actors seeking infrastructure reconnaissance. Increased connectivity between systems for monitoring purposes could provide additional pathways for lateral movement.

These risks are real, but they’re manageable through proper system design. Security‑monitoring infrastructure can be hardened using zero‑trust architectures, encrypted communications, and isolated management networks. The risk of compromised monitoring systems is far lower than the demonstrated risk of unmonitored infrastructure.

The transparency objection also reveals flawed risk assessment. Organizations worry about theoretical attack vectors while ignoring demonstrated vulnerabilities. Romanian Waters was compromised through existing connectivity they didn’t acknowledge. Better monitoring wouldn’t have created new risks; it would have detected existing compromise before it reached crisis levels.

The national‑security argument against transparency—that visible infrastructure is targetable infrastructure—fundamentally misunderstands modern threat actors. Sophisticated attackers already know where critical‑infrastructure systems are located. They conduct reconnaissance regardless of whether