DEF CON hackers plug security holes in US water systems amid tsunami of threats www.theregister.com/2025/08/1…

A DEF CON hacker walks into a small-town water facility…no, this is not the setup for a joke or a (super-geeky) odd-couple rom-com. It’s a true story that happened at five utilities across four states.

And now, nine months into providing free cybersecurity services to a handful of American critical infrastructure systems, the project’s organizers plan to grow the initiative massively before the end of the year to protect thousands of water systems across the country.

The Franklin project, named for Benjamin Franklin, who founded America’s first volunteer fire department, launched at last year’s DEF CON with 350 people signing up to give their time and talent to water facilities at no charge.

The volunteers were deployed across five water systems in four states — Indiana, Oregon, Utah, and Vermont — and provided no-cost assistance with cybersecurity basics, such as making sure the utilities had changed default passwords and turned on multi-factor authentication. They also assisted with asset inventories, operational technology (OT) assessments, and network mapping and scanning.