Publication Target Date: August 11
Submission Deadline: July 25
Article Working Title: Water and Wastewater: Securing the Sector That Cannot Staff a Security Team
Editorial Brief: Water and wastewater is the sector where the gap between what is at stake and what can be resourced is widest. Tens of thousands of systems, many of them small municipal utilities run by a handful of operators, deliver a service where a successful attack is a public-health event — and the documented incidents of remote manipulation of treatment set points have made that concrete rather than theoretical. The article should examine the sector honestly: the structural underfunding, the dependence on a small number of operators who carry the institutional knowledge, the exposure of internet-reachable HMIs and remote-access tooling, and the role of the data-center and industrial demand that is now reshaping water demand in some regions. It should treat the regulatory and support landscape — AWIA risk and resilience assessment obligations, the role of the Water ISAC, AWWA guidance, and the federal support and enforcement debate — without pretending the smallest utilities can execute a large-utility program. The practical core should be what a resource-constrained operator can actually do: the highest-value basics, free and low-cost support, mutual-aid models, and cyber-informed engineering approaches that reduce consequence without a large budget. Those lessons apply to every under-resourced operator of essential services.
