When a Password Becomes a Data Problem: What the Water-System Hacks Really Exposed
Imagine an operator arriving at a small-town water plant to find that the controller running the main pump no longer recognizes her login. Someone renamed it, changed its network address, and locked her out with a password she never set. That is not a scene from a thriller — it is close to what happened at water utilities across the United States starting in late July, and it reveals something more mundane and more troubling than a sophisticated cyberattack: a failure to know what devices exist, where they are reachable, and who can actually touch them.