Defending Our Water – Defending Our Lives
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BSides Las Vegas 2025 · Day 1
This **water and wastewater** panel connects **public health**, **civil engineering scale**, and **cyber risk** through the lens of **cyber-informed engineering (CIE)**—a discipline, championed in the session by **Ginger Wright** (**Idaho National Laboratory**), that asks engineers to treat **digital adversary effects** as first-class inputs to **physical** and **process** outcomes. **Andrew Orth** (**West Yost Associates**) grounds the discussion in **utility operations**: source water, treatment, distribution, **booster** stations, **SCADA**, and the staggering **fragmentation** of U.S. water systems (**~151,000** systems by one definition cited in the talk, with most people served by a long tail of small systems). A third billed panelist, **Dean Ford**, is absent due to a work emergency but contributes **slides** and prior **BSides LV** history referenced by the moderators.
AI review
A long-form critical-infrastructure panel that explains cyber-informed engineering clearly and gives memorable engineering-boundary examples, but it is policy/process theater more than new technical research.