Texas Water Cybersecurity: Inside Texas Cyber Command’s Project Watershed 250

A 6-month, Texas-only pilot built on donated private sector labor and tooling.

Project Watershed 250 is a 6-month pilot overseen by the Office of the National Cyber Director and Texas Cyber Command in which 12 private cyber and artificial intelligence companies provide red team testing, system hardening, and AI-assisted vulnerability remediation to Texas water utilities at no cost.

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross framed it as an experiment rather than a finished program: "We are going to find out what works. We're going to target that, and we're going to scale off of this." Abbott was blunter about why Texas volunteered as the test bed. "The need for cyber resilience is overwhelming," he said. "Many rural providers simply don't have the resources they need."

• Red team testing. Outside operators attack the utility's systems the way a real adversary would, then report what worked.
• Hardening with donated tooling. Vendor products get deployed into environments that could not otherwise license them.
• AI-assisted defense. Tools that help a one-person IT shop triage and remediate findings instead of drowning in a 200-line report.
• 6 months, Texas only. The pilot is scoped to Texas before any decision about scaling it nationally.
• State-run implementation. Texas Cyber Command handles delivery on the ground, which makes this a state program with federal sponsorship rather than the reverse.

One practical note before the criticism starts. If you operate a water or wastewater system anywhere from Katy to The Woodlands, this is a red team and a hardening engagement you would otherwise have to buy, offered at no cost inside a limited window. Get in front of Texas Cyber Command and get on the list. There is no version of waiting that ends better.

Not everyone is convinced the prototype solves the right problem. Jacob Krell, senior director for secure AI solutions and cybersecurity at Suzu Labs, pointed out that the operators in question are still struggling to inventory what they have connected to the internet, shut down insecure remote access, hire security staff, and fix vulnerabilities they already know about. "Offering increasingly sophisticated AI defensive capabilities without fixing those fundamentals is like giving someone a Tesla when what they need is a road," he wrote. A cyber professional quoted anonymously by CyberScoop made a narrower complaint: this is the government asking industry to fund work the government should be paying for.

Both critiques land, and neither one makes the work worthless. The road-before-the-Tesla point is the useful one for any business reading this, because the fundamentals Krell lists are the same 5 items in the checklist further down this page.

A coordinated July attack on Minnesota water utilities, on top of a Texas incident record going back to 2024.

Project Watershed 250 follows a coordinated cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water and wastewater utilities across roughly 48 hours in late July 2026, after which utilities in at least 7 states reported incidents and some of that activity degraded water operations.

Between July 26 and July 27, 2026, Minnesota IT reported a coordinated campaign against water and wastewater systems statewide. Four cities disclosed publicly: Braham, Plymouth, South St. Paul, and Maple Plain. In Braham, a city of roughly 1,700 people, the attack disabled computerized operating controls and took the well and water treatment plant offline. Public works crews brought it back in about 2 hours, tower storage kept water flowing, and officials said quality and safety were never affected. The FBI identified the targeted devices as Rockwell Automation MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series PLCs reachable from the internet.

Texas already had its own file on this. On January 18, 2024, an attacker reached a remote-access industrial software interface at the Muleshoe municipal water system, manipulated a tank level value, and caused an overflow that ran 30 to 45 minutes before city staff pulled the device off the network and switched to manual operation. A Telegram channel calling itself the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn claimed it and posted video. In April 2024, Mandiant tied that channel to Sandworm, the GRU's Unit 74455. The same day as Muleshoe, suspicious activity showed up on the SCADA system in Lockney, and Hale Center logged 37,000 firewall login attempts over 4 days.

The Congressional Research Service put the July wave in front of Congress on August 27, 2026, 4 days before the pilot was announced. Analyst Elena H. Humphreys opened that report by noting that attacks reported in at least 7 states "have increased attention on the security of the nation's municipal water infrastructure." Watershed 250 arrived into that attention.

The federal mandate was withdrawn in 2023 and the grant money was never appropriated.

Project Watershed 250 is structured as donated private sector work because the federal rules that would have required water system cybersecurity were rescinded in October 2023, and Congress has not appropriated funding for the Safe Drinking Water Act cybersecurity assistance programs it already authorized.

The Congressional Research Service laid out the scale on August 27, 2026. The Safe Drinking Water Act covers nearly 144,000 public water systems, of which about 49,500 are community water systems serving more than 324 million people. America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018 requires risk-and-resilience assessments and emergency response plans, but only for community systems serving more than 3,300 people. Those assessments are voluntary for small systems, and 81% of community water systems are small by EPA's definition. That is the exact population Abbott described as lacking resources, and it is the population the pilot targets.

Compliance is thin even where the requirement is mandatory. CRS cites a 2024 EPA enforcement notice stating that more than 70% of systems EPA inspected since September 2023 were in violation of basic SDWA Section 1433 requirements, with at least 100 enforcement actions between 2020 and 2024. Separately, the EPA Office of Inspector General scanned 1,062 water systems serving 50,000 or more people and found 97 systems serving roughly 26.6 million users with critical or high-risk cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

EPA did try the direct route. In March 2023 it issued an interpretive memorandum requiring states to evaluate water system operational technology cybersecurity during the routine on-site inspections known as sanitary surveys. Stakeholders petitioned for judicial review, arguing EPA had not followed the Administrative Procedure Act and had exceeded its statutory authority. EPA rescinded the memorandum in October 2023. On the money side, CRS notes Congress has never specified appropriations for the SDWA Section 1433(g) technical assistance program or the Section 1459G advanced technology grants.

The pilot covers Texas water utilities. Private industrial operators running identical gear get nothing.

Oil and gas SCADA cybersecurity in Houston sits outside the scope of Project Watershed 250, which means private operators running the same HMIs, PLCs, and remote-access software as the utilities in the pilot receive no donated assessment, no donated tooling, and no red team.

The equipment does not care who owns it. The Rockwell MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 controllers the FBI named in Minnesota are the same low-cost, long-lived PLCs sitting in packaged skids, lift stations, and small process lines all over the Houston metro. A pump station controller in a small Texas water district and a tank battery controller on a Houston-area lease are frequently the same hardware, reached the same way, with the same integrator account still enabled. In 35+ years doing this, the thing that has not changed is that industrial gear gets bought by operations, installed by a contractor, and then patched by nobody, because no one on the org chart owns it.

CinchOps measures this locally rather than guessing at it. The CinchOps Houston Area Security Index scored 953 Houston manufacturers at a 1.57 GPA, the lowest of the 3 industries measured, with 46.6% failing and only 24.9% passing. Sugar Land manufacturers came in at a 1.15 GPA with 65% failing across the 20 businesses scored there. Legal practices and CPA firms both landed at 1.61, which is less a compliment to them than an indictment of the whole set.

We see this twice a month with Houston businesses: a flat network where the office file server, the accounting workstation, and the control system all sit in the same broadcast domain, plus a vendor VPN account that has not been rotated since the system was commissioned. Energy operators running WellView, OpenWells, P2 Energy Solutions, or Enertia alongside plant control systems carry an extra problem. A ransomware event in the business network can stop field work even when the control network is technically untouched, because the people who run the field cannot see their own data.

The pilot's playbook is not secret, and most of it does not require a vendor donation.

The defensive work inside Project Watershed 250 is inventory, segmentation, credential hygiene, outside testing, and a manual-operations plan, and a Houston business with 10 to 200 employees can run all 5 without waiting for a federal program.

• Inventory everything reachable from the internet. Braham was hit through internet-facing PLCs and Muleshoe through a remote-access industrial interface. Pull an external scan and account for every open port, every remote-support tool, and every cellular modem sitting on a skid.
• Separate the business network from the control network. IT/OT segmentation is the single control that turns a total outage into a contained one. Office ransomware should not be able to reach a PLC.
• Kill default and shared credentials. Vendor accounts, integrator logins, and the shared operator password taped inside the panel are the 3 most common ways in. Rotate them and put multi-factor authentication on every remote path.
• Get tested by somebody who does not work for you. The pilot's headline feature is a red team. A scoped external assessment gives you the same class of answer, and it is the only way to learn whether your controls actually hold.
• Write the manual-operations runbook. Braham's public works crew restored service in about 2 hours by hand, and Muleshoe stopped its overflow by disconnecting the device and running the system manually. If your people cannot operate for 4 hours without the HMI, that is a business continuity gap, not an IT gap.

None of that is exotic. It is the boring half of security that gets skipped because nothing breaks when you skip it, right up until something does. It is also, item for item, the road Krell says operators need before anybody hands them a Tesla.

CinchOps is a managed IT services provider based in Katy, Texas, serving small and mid-sized businesses across the Houston metro area. CinchOps specializes in cybersecurity, network security, managed IT support, VoIP, and SD-WAN for businesses with 10 to 200 employees.

• Through managed cybersecurity, CinchOps runs external exposure scanning, credential and remote-access cleanup, and monitored endpoint defense across both the business network and the systems that touch operations.
• Through managed IT support, CinchOps handles patching, vendor account governance, and the help desk work that keeps segmentation from quietly getting undone 6 months after it is built.
• Through business continuity and disaster recovery, CinchOps keeps geo-redundant backups outside the Gulf Coast flood zone so a ransomware event and a hurricane cannot take the same copy of your data.
• Industrial and field operators get sector-specific work through oil and gas IT, manufacturing IT, energy services and utilities IT, and engineering firm IT.
• Local coverage runs across Houston, Katy, Sugar Land, Cypress, and The Woodlands, at a flat monthly rate per user with no contracts, no hidden fees, and no cancellation penalties.

Texas Cyber Command is about to spend 6 months proving what a small utility can fix when somebody competent finally looks. If you run one of those systems, take the free help and take it early. The findings will not surprise anybody who does this work: exposed devices, stale vendor accounts, flat networks. If that describes your operation and nobody is donating 6 months of engineering to you, start with an external scan and an honest inventory, then talk to CinchOps about what to fix first.