Threat actors have successfully breached the computer systems of other water districts, is BWD at risk? To test the water district’s defenses, BWD brought in a team of experts to try to cyber-attack us. And the good news is, that while it’s impossible to be risk-free, BWD got excellent marks from the experts.

BWD is a small water district and we can’t afford to have the highly trained cybersecurity specialists to protect us against the ever-increasing levels of cyber threats. Fortunately, the US government can and did help us. CISA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is an agency within Homeland Security that offers free cybersecurity consulting services. At BWD’s request CISA specialists performed an assessment of BWD’s computer security. The CISA four-member team assigned to BWD have combined experience of over 100 assessments and 30 years in the cybersecurity industry. They spent a week trying to break-in remotely, the way a foreign or domestic hacker would. After that they came to Borrego and spent a week in the BWD conference room, attacking from the inside. Despite their years of training and customized attack tools, the CISA team was unable to break into our network.

Some other takeaways from our CISA team, Borrego is the most remote location they’d been to, in the week they were here they were able to try all our restaurants where every meal was good, the drive down Montezuma was breath-taking but a bit unnerving and it’s with great disappointment that they left without seeing a roadrunner.

They also left us with this reminder, everyone is a potential target for cyber-attack. When you’re reading email, never click on a link unless you know you can trust the source.