Securing an APAC Water Utility

The Analysis

A routine vulnerability scan of a major APAC water utility identified hundreds of issues across their technology estate. Among these were two seemingly unremarkable, medium-severity CVEs (let's call them CVE-A and CVE-B) found in the core industrial control system (ICS) responsible for water distribution. From a purely technical, volume-based perspective, these two CVEs were lost in the noise of the larger vulnerability report.

However, our analysis began by establishing the Business Context. Through interviews with the operations team, we identified the ICS as a "crown jewel" asset—any disruption would have significant public health and safety implications. This immediately elevated the importance of any vulnerability found within that system.

Next, we examined the Threat Context. Our intelligence feeds revealed that a specific threat actor group was actively and successfully chaining the exploits for CVE-A and CVE-B together in the wild to compromise similar ICS environments. This was not a theoretical threat; it was a current, active campaign.

The Synthesis & Outcome

The Praexian Focus™ Platform synthesised these three critical contexts—Business, Technology, and Threat. The platform elevated the CVE-A and CVE-B chain from two medium-severity issues to a single, CRITICAL-risk event. The business impact was catastrophic, the technology was proven to be vulnerable, and a known adversary was actively exploiting this precise path.

This provided the utility's security team with the clear, data-driven justification they needed. They were able to perform an emergency mitigation on the two issues that mattered, preventing a potential safety incident. Crucially, they were also able to defensibly avoid the noise of the other 500+ lower-risk vulnerabilities, saving hundreds of hours of wasted effort and focusing their resources where they would have the greatest impact.