Targeted but Unnoticed: What Rural Water Facility Hacks Reveal About U.S. Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
- Keith Pachulski
- Apr 21
- 8 min read
What Happened in Muleshoe?
Last week, municipal staff in Muleshoe, Texas—a small rural town—identified unusual activity within their water system’s control interface. The system is managed via an internet-connected SCADA setup, which allows operators to remotely monitor and control water treatment and distribution. During routine use, staff noticed irregular commands being issued and telemetry data fluctuating without operator input.
Their response was quick: the system was manually disconnected from the network, allowing them to maintain physical control and avoid service disruption. While that action likely prevented any damage, forensic review of the incident identified multiple indicators of compromise (IOCs) tied to Russian state-sponsored groups—specifically, artifacts associated with Sandworm, a GRU-affiliated advanced persistent threat (APT).
No data was stolen. No ransom notes were dropped. No infrastructure was destroyed.
But the indicators were clear: this wasn’t a spray-and-pray ransomware attempt. It was a deliberate intrusion into a critical system, likely to validate access and assess how deeply attackers could embed without detection.
This isn’t a big city water authority with a SOC team or dedicated security analysts. This is a town with a lean staff, minimal IT oversight, and no expectation that they’d ever be on a foreign adversary’s radar. That mindset is exactly what makes them vulnerable.
The Muleshoe incident is a clear signal that adversaries are shifting tactics—from noisy attacks meant to disrupt, to quiet ones meant to persist. When a threat actor takes the time to access a system without damaging it, they're not making a mistake—they're mapping the terrain. They're testing your response time, your detection capabilities, and your operational gaps.
If you're running internet-facing control systems, even behind a VPN, you're exposed. If your team assumes “we’re too small to be a target,” you’re already on the back foot. And if you only look for threats once systems break, you won’t see the compromise until it’s operational.
This isn’t about ransomware anymore. This is about preparation for future leverage—whether in a conflict, a crisis, or a coordinated campaign to undermine public trust in basic services.
Why Rural Infrastructure is an Ideal Target
From an adversary’s perspective, rural infrastructure offers the perfect combination of high strategic value and low operational resistance.
These environments typically run lean—municipal IT responsibilities are often handled by a generalist or an outsourced provider. That person might manage everything from printers to wastewater control systems. Cybersecurity isn’t just underfunded—it’s often not even on the radar.
Most of these facilities use legacy SCADA or PLC systems, often running on end-of-life Windows machines. Remote access solutions are rarely hardened, and it's common to see flat networks with no segmentation between IT and OT environments. Add in a lack of real-time monitoring, and it becomes clear: for an attacker, this isn’t even low-hanging fruit—it’s fruit on the ground.
When you look at it from a threat actor’s point of view, there are three things working in their favor:
First, detection is rare to nonexistent. Without any monitoring tools or even basic alerting on the control network, attackers can move freely for weeks—sometimes months—before anyone notices.
What to do: Start with basic logging and alerting. Even enabling simple event logs on critical assets and forwarding them to a central location gives you a line of sight you didn’t have before.
Second, they can persist as long as they want. These environments often don’t have scheduled audits or incident response tests. Once attackers get in, there's no pressure forcing them out.
What to do: Introduce regular system reviews and network sweeps. Schedule offline snapshots of key configurations and perform a monthly check for unauthorized changes or new user accounts.
Third, they can create disproportionate impact with minimal effort. Shutting down a water pump or spoofing sensor data in a rural area can cause panic, loss of trust, and even political fallout—especially if timed with a broader campaign elsewhere.
What to do: Build contingency plans for system failure—even if it’s just manual operation. Document failover procedures, train staff on them, and make sure there’s a chain of communication in place.
Operational Reality Check
If you're responsible for municipal infrastructure, there's a good chance your systems are more exposed than you think. Remote access might be open through old VPNs or unmanaged cloud portals. Your control systems—originally designed for availability, not resilience—probably sit on flat networks, where a compromise in one part gives access to the rest. And if you don’t know what “normal” looks like on your network, you won’t notice when something’s off. That’s exactly what attackers count on.
What Needs to Happen
Small doesn’t mean insignificant. Adversaries aren’t targeting size—they’re targeting gaps. The first step is shifting the mindset. If your systems serve critical functions—water, wastewater, dispatch, traffic control—they’re already on the list. The only question is how long it takes someone to find your weak point and how long they stay there before you notice.
The Pattern of Low-Impact Probing
What happened in Muleshoe isn’t new—it’s part of a growing trend in cyber operations where the goal isn’t immediate disruption, but quiet access.
Adversaries, particularly nation-state actors, are shifting away from high-profile attacks and toward persistent, low-visibility intrusions. They’re mapping networks, identifying unprotected control points, and embedding themselves where they can return later—when the stakes are higher, and the effect can be amplified.
This is reconnaissance with purpose. It’s preparation for a larger campaign.
We’ve seen it before:
In Ukraine, where Russian threat groups maintained silent access to power systems months before shutting down grids in coordinated blackouts.
In U.S. sectors, where advanced persistent threats (APTs) have sat dormant inside energy and logistics networks, waiting for a trigger.
And now in water systems—quiet compromises with no immediate action, but full situational awareness gained.
What makes these incidents particularly dangerous is that they don’t trip alarms. There’s no damage to investigate, no ransom demand to respond to. Instead, attackers are validating access pathways, understanding system behaviors, and confirming how far they can go before anyone notices.
If you're only watching for loud events, you're missing the real threat.
The attackers aren't trying to be noticed. They're not testing your security—they’re testing your complacency.
If you’re only investigating incidents that break things, you’re already behind. By the time you find the compromise, they’ve already mapped your operations, exfiltrated your configs, and written playbooks for how to disable or disrupt you later.
How You Stay Ahead of That Curve:
Start by establishing baselines. Understand what normal traffic, system activity, and operator behavior looks like. That doesn’t require a full security operations center—it requires situational awareness and tools that give you early visibility.
For endpoint and system monitoring, commercial tools like CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne, or Darktrace offer powerful detection and threat intelligence capabilities. But if you’re working in resource-constrained environments, we built FIMonisec to solve exactly that problem. It gives real-time alerts on unauthorized file changes, unknown processes, or tampering with system logs—focused, low-noise alerts you can actually act on.
Then there’s detection through deception. You can’t defend what you can’t see—but you can detect what shouldn’t be there. Our Jebakan honeypot platform lets you deploy deceptive services and hosts across both internal networks and perimeter segments. It’s designed to trip alerts on unauthorized scanning, credential harvesting, or lateral movement attempts—giving you intelligence before attackers get to real assets.
Audit your remote access. If it’s not essential, disable it. If it is, secure it with MFA, logging, and strict access control.
And finally, plant some traps. Use honey admin accounts, fake shares, or beaconed files that raise the alarm when touched.
Broader National Security Implications
These incidents aren’t just IT problems—they’re national security signals. What happened in Muleshoe, and in other small towns like it, is a preview of how modern conflict unfolds. No explosions, no public declarations—just quiet access and patient positioning.
Russia and other capable adversaries aren’t probing small infrastructure because they want to disrupt a single town. They’re doing it to understand the terrain. When tensions rise, they already know where the soft targets are, what systems can be quickly disrupted, and how to undermine public trust in basic services without firing a shot.
These aren’t theoretical risks. They align with what we’ve seen in state-sponsored playbooks for hybrid warfare—targeting the digital backbone of civilian life: water, power, healthcare, logistics, and communications.
And here’s the hard truth: federal agencies can’t scale fast enough to defend every small utility or municipality. The DHS, CISA, and FBI all provide guidance, but execution is local. And many localities simply aren’t resourced or staffed to take on the kind of threats we’re now facing.
This is where the risk compounds
When attackers compromise five or ten small systems across different states, the individual impact may seem minimal. But coordinated disruptions—especially during a crisis—can fracture public confidence, delay emergency response, and tie up resources at a national level. This isn’t just about uptime. It’s about resilience during disruption.
What Needs to Change
Local governments and service providers need to start seeing their systems not as utilities, but as strategic assets. That means:
Shifting from reactive to proactive defense.
Building relationships with state cyber units and trusted private security partners before something breaks.
Treating low-level alerts, weird log entries, or unexplained network traffic as early warnings—not IT noise.
This isn’t a call for panic—it’s a call for posture. If you’re responsible for any part of a public service, you’re on the front line of a new kind of threat. The difference now is that the first signs of compromise won’t be sirens—they’ll be silence.
What Small Municipalities Can Do Now
You don’t need to be a cybersecurity expert to improve your defenses—you just need to take the first steps and keep your systems from being easy targets.
Start with visibility. If you don’t know what’s on your network, you can’t protect it. That means doing a full asset inventory—hardware, software, network-connected devices, control panels, and remote access points. Identify everything with an IP address, and confirm who should have access to it.
From there, look at your segmentation. If your water plant control systems are on the same network as your email server or city hall Wi-Fi, you have a problem. Split those networks up. Even basic firewall rules or VLANs can limit how far an intruder can move if they get in.
Build monitoring into your routine operations. This doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. Use tools like FIMonisec to track system modifications in real time. Set alerts on unusual logins or file changes. Pair that with Jebakan honeypots to detect unauthorized access attempts before they reach production systems.
And don’t wait for a crisis to plan your response. Write down what to do if you lose remote access, if your SCADA system goes offline, or if your control computer is compromised. Make sure your staff knows how to run key operations manually and who to call for help.
Simple, tactical steps to get started:
Remove any remote access you don’t absolutely need.
Require strong passwords and enable MFA on everything that supports it.
Keep one clean backup of your control system configs, and store it offline.
Establish a contact at your state’s cyber response team—or build a relationship with a trusted private partner.
Document your baseline. Know what’s normal for your environment, so you can recognize when something’s off.
Cybersecurity doesn’t need to be perfect. But it does need to be deliberate. When you take small, focused steps, you close the biggest gaps—the ones attackers are counting on you to ignore.
The Quiet War Has Already Started
Cyberattacks on rural infrastructure aren’t accidents—and they’re not isolated. They’re quiet, calculated steps in a broader strategy. Adversaries are preparing, positioning, and learning—while many local systems remain unmonitored, unsegmented, and unprepared.
If you run critical services, even in a small town, you’re part of the national defense equation now. The systems you manage—water, power, communications—are the connective tissue of society. And when those systems fail, the impact cascades.
You don’t need a million-dollar security stack or a dedicated cyber team to get started. What you need is awareness, visibility, and a plan. Monitor your environment. Know your assets. Harden what you can. And above all—don’t wait for someone else to sound the alarm.
This is no longer about “if” small municipalities will be targeted. It’s about how many already have been, and how long we’ll keep assuming it’s someone else’s problem.
The threat is here. Now it’s up to us to respond.
Need a Ground-Level Assessment? Start Here.
If you’re responsible for municipal or utility infrastructure and aren’t sure where your vulnerabilities are—we can help. Red Cell Security provides tailored assessments for small and midsize environments, including threat emulation, network segmentation reviews, and real-time monitoring solutions like FIMonisec and Jebakan.
Schedule a 30-minute consult—no sales pitch, no fluff. Just a focused conversation about your current posture and what immediate steps you can take to close the biggest gaps.
Comments