C0020: Maroochy Water Breach
Maroochy Water Breach was an incident in 2000 where an adversary leveraged the local government’s wastewater control system and stolen engineering equipment to disrupt and eventually release 800,000 liters of raw sewage into the local community.[1]
Security context for executives and security teams
C0020: Maroochy Water Breach describes [Maroochy Water Breach](https://attack.mitre.org/campaigns/C0020) was an incident in 2000 where an adversary leveraged the local government’s wastewater control system and stolen engineering equipment to disrupt and eventually release 800,000 liters of raw sewage into the local community.(Citation: Marshall Abrams July 2008)
Executive priority
C0020: Maroochy Water Breach is an official MITRE ATT&CK campaign. Glexia treats it as defensive behavior context for prioritizing monitoring, control validation, and response planning without using the object by itself as an attribution claim.
Technical view
Security teams should validate C0020: Maroochy Water Breach by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (the mapped ATT&CK tactic context), supported platforms (the platforms named in the official object), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.
Likely telemetry
- Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata
Detection direction
- Validate whether C0020: Maroochy Water Breach appears in your detection coverage and tabletop scenarios.
- Use the object to align executive risk language with SOC, incident response, and detection engineering work.
- Do not treat ATT&CK relationship context as attribution without corroborating evidence.
Mitigation priorities
- Map the object to existing controls and identify missing telemetry or response ownership.
- Prioritize mitigations that reduce exposure on the listed platforms and tactics.
- Review adjacent ATT&CK relationships before changing policy, detections, or reporting language.
Additional notes and limits
Baseline Glexia take generated from the official MITRE ATT&CK STIX object, source hash, tactics, platforms, and detection fields. It is safe to replace with a richer model-generated take for the same source hash later.
This baseline take is source-grounded and schema-validated, but it does not include environment-specific telemetry, incident evidence, or threat-intelligence corroboration.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Maroochy Water Breach
Maroochy Water Breach was an incident in 2000 where an adversary leveraged the local government’s wastewater control system and stolen engineering equipment to disrupt and eventually release 800,000 liters of raw sewage into the local community.[1]
How security teams should use this page
Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.
Techniques used
This mirrors the MITRE pattern of making group, software, campaign, and technique relationships scannable. Relationship notes come from mirrored ATT&CK relationship text when available.
| Domain | ID | Name | Relationship / procedure |
|---|---|---|---|
| ICS | T1692.002 | Reporting MessageSub-technique | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary used a dedicated analog two-way radio system to send false data and instructions to pumping stations and the central computer.[1] |
| ICS | T0822 | External Remote Services | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary gained remote computer access to the system over radio.[1] |
| ICS | T0838 | Modify Alarm Settings | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary disabled alarms at four pumping stations, preventing notifications to the central computer.[1] |
| ICS | T0864 | Transient Cyber Asset | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary utilized a computer, possibly stolen, with proprietary engineering software to communicate with a wastewater system.[1] |
| ICS | T0879 | Damage to Property | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary gained remote computer access to the control system and altered data so that whatever function should have occurred at affected pumping stations did not occur or occurred in a different way. This ultimately led to 800,000 liters of raw sewage being spilled out into the community. The raw sewage affected local parks, rivers, and even a local hotel. This resulted in harm to marine life and produced a sickening stench from the community's affected rivers.[1] |
| ICS | T0836 | Modify Parameter | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary gained remote computer access to the control system and altered data so that whatever function should have occurred at affected pumping stations did not occur or occurred in a different way. The software program installed in the laptop was one developed for changing configurations in the PDS computers. This ultimately led to 800,000 liters of raw sewage being spilled out into the community.[1] |
| ICS | T0813 | Denial of Control | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary temporarily shut an investigator out of the network preventing them from issuing any controls.[1] |
| ICS | T0860 | Wireless Compromise | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary used a two-way radio to communicate with and set the frequencies of Maroochy Shire's repeater stations.[1] |
| ICS | T0848 | Rogue Master | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary falsified network addresses in order to send false data and instructions to pumping stations.[1] |
| ICS | T0878 | Alarm Suppression | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary suppressed alarm reporting to the central computer.[1] |
| ICS | T0815 | Denial of View | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary temporarily shut an investigator out of the network, preventing them from viewing the state of the system.[1] |
| ICS | T1692.001 | Command MessageSub-technique | In the Maroochy Water Breach, the adversary used a dedicated analog two-way radio system to send false data and instructions to pumping stations and the central computer.[1] |
All related ATT&CK context
Object version and sync metadata
The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates.
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
| Release | Bundle imported | Object version | Modified | Status | Raw hash |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19.2 | 1.0 | Current bundle | 7eec28445ff2… | ||
| 19.1 | 1.0 | Older bundle | 6cf19284e578… |
Mirrored ATT&CK source object
The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.
External references and citations
MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.
- [1]Marshall Abrams July 2008
Marshall Abrams 2008, July 23 Malicious Control System Cyber Security Attack Case Study Maroochy Water Services, Australia Retrieved. 2018/03/27
Open source URL - [2]mitre-attackC0020Open source URL
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