Overview
- Project Watershed 250 began as a six‑month pilot in Texas that was announced in San Antonio on Monday, August 31 and pairs the Office of the National Cyber Director with Texas Cyber Command to run tests and fixes on water and wastewater networks.
- Federal agencies EPA and CISA are official partners and a roster of private companies including Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS, Palo Alto Networks and Dragos will provide tools, threat intelligence and red‑team services to probe and harden systems.
- The pilot will deploy AI tooling — including open‑weight models run on utilities’ systems — to identify software and configuration flaws such as exposed remote access, weak credentials and legacy programmable logic controllers and then help remediate those issues at no cost to participating utilities.
- Officials say the program was planned before recent coordinated intrusions that hit more than 30 municipal systems in Minnesota but that those attacks underscored the risks; investigators and some officials have pointed to Iran‑linked actors as a leading hypothesis while forensic attribution remains under investigation.
- If the Texas trial shows practical fixes and operational lessons, the administration intends to scale the model nationally and inform future policy, funding and technical standards to help understaffed rural and small utilities better protect drinking water.