Gov. Abbott, White House launch cybersecurity project to secure Texas water

AUSTIN (Nexstar) — In a roundtable discussion today with cybersecurity experts, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Project Watershed 250, a joint effort between the U.S. Government, Texas Government and private sector partners to provide free cybersecurity services to local water utilities across Texas. The project will exclusively be in Texas for the six months as a pilot program.

Project Watershed 250 comes as a result of months of growing nationwide concern over water and utility cybersecurity, including concern from numerous federal and state agencies.

“Texas is under perpetual cyber attacks, including cyber attacks on our water systems.” Abbott said.

One of the most recent documented cyber attacks in Texas was at a water facility in Muleshoe. A hack caused the water system to overflow in January 2024, with a report later determining a Russian-aligned hacking group infiltrated the water system. Small, rural towns may be more susceptible to cyber attacks than larger cities due to a lack of cybersecurity infrastructure and fewer, more identifiable hacking targets.

“They don’t have the expertise. They don’t have the type of employees that can really protect them from these cyber attacks,” said San Antonio Water System CEO Robert Puente.

“Some of them are much more susceptible to these kinds of attacks because they have, for example, one water source, so you know what to attack,” Puente said, “Others, like San Antonio, have multiple water sources. We have over 13 different water projects, so it’s hard to pinpoint any one.”

The pilot program is designed to support cybersecurity infrastructure for rural utilities facilities, bolstering cyber capabilities through red teaming, vulnerability assessments, remediation, mitigation and AI-enabled cyber defense.

“Texas and more states to come will also build and deploy cutting edge artificial intelligence enabled cyber tools in coordination with the private sector to detect and stop future threats at machine speed,” White House National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said. “By making these capabilities easy to use, we can put them in small and rural utilities hands that don’t typically have large cybersecurity teams to handle it.”

Texas Cyber Command, the state agency established by Governor Abbott in June 2025, is a key player in Project Watershed 250, providing threat intelligence, security operations, and working in conjunction with various state and federal agencies. Texas Cyber Command Director of Planning and Strategy Mark Lavin told KXAN how the agency plans to tackle the new partnership and use their resources to protect Texas utilities.

“We’ve been spending a lot of our time working with state agency partners, but then also probably the most important one that you’re seeing now with the water utility project is critical infrastructure,” Lavin told KXAN.