Small water utilities across the United States are getting a new line of defense. DEF CON Franklin and the National Rural Water Association have launched the Water Watch Center, a program that pairs rural water systems with managed detection and response providers following a wave of state-sponsored attacks on the sector.
The center launches with five security firms — Defendify, Legato Security, L1 Secure, Rapid7, and Sentinel Technologies — that will feed threat intelligence to NRWA as the national coordination hub. The program targets the roughly 45,000 community water systems serving fewer than 10,000 people, which account for about 91 percent of the nation’s utilities and have historically lacked the budget for dedicated security teams.
Announced at DEF CON in Las Vegas, the effort builds on two years of volunteer work in which DEF CON Franklin paired nearly 450 volunteer cyber experts with utilities across seven states. That experience exposed the core problem: scaling security across 150,000 water and wastewater systems, many of which rely on aging control equipment.
The Water Watch Center is also working with Vanderbilt University to apply DARPA’s CASTLE research program, building digital twins of utility environments where AI-driven red and blue team agents can test automated defenses before deployment.
