Don’t lye to me…

In case your anxiety subsided, read this to bring it back:

"Water facilities are particularly problematic," said Suzanne Spaulding, who was the chief cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration. "When I first came into DHS and started getting the sector-specific briefings, my team said, 'Here's what you've got to know about water facilities: When you've seen one water facility, you've seen one water facility.'"

The U.S.'s 54,000 or so drinking water systems are run independently, by either local governments or small corporations. That means there are thousands of different security setups, often run by generalists who are responsible for the technology of their particular systems.

"I've been to numerous water treatment facilities where there is one IT person or two IT people," said Lesley Carhart, a principal threat analyst at the cybersecurity company Dragos. "And they have to handle everything from provisioning computers and devices that keep the infrastructure running to trying to do security.

Cybersecurity is a huge concern for any business of any size. I’m down for the free market, I’m down for government contracts, I’m down for technology, but at the same time, I don’t underestimate the - shall we say - resourcefulness of people, least of all hackers. Hackers hack because they can. And look at the resulting chaos.

Lye-poisoning attack in Florida shows cybersecurity gaps in water systems by Kevin Collier.