Raleigh Water prepared after national cyberattacks on water utility facilities

After cyberattacks hit water facilities in 7 states, Raleigh Water says it’s prepared.

2026-07-31

“We’re in a good spot,” Ed Buchan, Raleigh Water Assistant Director said. “We don’t want to ever talk in absolutes in this business but I think we’ve done our due diligence to protect ourselves from this type of cyberattack.”

More than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota were hit by the attack. A law enforcement official who spoke to NBC News says the attack in Minnesota has the hallmarks of Iranian meddling.

A warning from a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources spokesperson said Minnesota experienced system pressures drop which triggered alarms and prompted a response from law enforcement. A Minnesota spokesperson denied that happened.

The federal Cyberseucrity and Infrastructure Security Agency said some larger attacks on water infrastructure he “resulted in boil water notices and sustained manual operations,” but did not say what locations.

CISA acting director Nick Andersen provided a statement on the matter: “CISA is currently observing a significant increase in cyber threat actors targeting programmable logic controllers (PLC) at water utilities. We urge critical infrastructure owners and operators to remove publicly exposed PLCs and other operational technology from the internet as soon as possible. We also encourage all organizations to review the latest guidance on CISA.gov and to report suspected incidents or anomalous activity to us for further support.”

A federal advisory calls on systems operators to remove programmable logic controllers, known as PLCs, from direct internet exposure. This is something Buhcan says Raleigh Water already does.

“PLCs are used throughout plants today to operate valves, chemical feeds, all sorts of things in a plant,” Buchan said. “Essentially, if you absolutely had to, you could operate a plant form your house but of course we don’t do that. Ours are not vulnerable in the same way that some of these other ones were.”

Buchan says their systems went through a stress test last year for during a simulated cyberattack done by the federal Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency.

“They try to hack your system,” Buchan said. “It’s kind of a trying experience because they’re very good at what they do.”

Raleigh Water navigated the test successfully.

“We are in  a very secure position on that,” Buchan said. “This is something in the water industry that has been talked about for quite some time now. I’m really very proud of our team for taking that step without something like this in the news. They recognize this is a potential issue. Let’s go ahead and be proactive and do this ahead of time.”

But should something happen to Raleigh Water, its 670,000 customers can rest assured they can pivot quickly.

“Operating a plant can still be done manually,” Buchan said. “There are a lot of things today where that may not be the case. Or, it’s very difficult to do so. But a water plant can be operated that way. So it’s possible for some outage or disruption to happen. But our staff are very highly trained and I think they could figure this out very quickly.”