May 11, 2026
The Weekly Note
Tech
Poland’s Internal Security Agency Reports Successful Breaches of 5 Water Treatment Plants, Says US is Next
Poland’s Internal Security Agency published a report detailing successful breaches of five water treatment plants where hackers gained access to industrial control equipment, with the worst-case scenario being direct tampering with water safety systems.
The attribution points squarely at Russia. The broader report documented multiple acts of sabotage organized by Russian intelligence against Polish military facilities, critical infrastructure, and civilian targets — activity the agency described as “real and immediate,” with some incidents potentially resulting in fatalities.
The US angle is what makes this more than a Poland story. CISA, the FBI, the NSA, and several other federal agencies issued a joint advisory last month warning that Iranian-backed hackers — specifically the group CyberAv3ngers, which previously breached water treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2023 — are actively targeting programmable logic controllers at US water and energy utilities. Two separate state actors, same playbook, same target class.
The structural vulnerability is well-documented and largely unaddressed. Water utilities have consistently been flagged as soft targets — under-resourced, running legacy industrial control systems, and often lacking the security controls that would be considered baseline in financial or defense sectors.Read Full Story
Defense
Pacific Marines testing “pilot optional” UH-72 Lakota
The Pentagon just inserted Wall Street into the room where defense contracts get signed.
Secretary Hegse just announced “Deal Team Six,” a crew of elite private sector negotiators housed within the Pentagon’s Economic Defense Unit and tasked with overhauling how the DoD strikes deals with defense contractors. The core grievance driving it is well-founded: decades of cost-plus contracting that rewarded delays, padded factory build costs onto the taxpayer, and let CEOs pocket the upside while schedule slippage became the norm.
The new model flips the equation. In exchange for steady, long-term production orders, contractors are expected to foot the bill for capacity expansion — new factories, assembly lines, and plants — while holding to flat pricing. Companies that don’t comply will simply be replaced.
The budget signal is worth noting. Deal Team Six received over $266 million in the FY2026 NDAA and is slated for more than $593 million in FY2027 — a doubling of its R&D and evaluation budget in a single year. That’s not a pilot program, that’s an institution being built.
The unit’s director is George Kollitides, formerly of Cerberus Capital Management’s defense practice — a signal that the Pentagon is importing private equity-style deal discipline, not just management consulting platitudes.Read Full Story
Critical Minerals
Germany eyes major vulnerability to US, Potash.
Sigma Lithium’s regulatory situation just went from bad to worse — and the timing couldn’t be more damaging.
Brazilian labor inspectors fined the company after discovering that trucks were actively depositing waste onto one of three waste piles that had been shut down since last December due to a “grave and imminent” risk to workers and the nearby community of Poco Dantas — the same pile where a partial rupture was previously reported near a local school.
The company’s conduct is making this worse than the original violation. Inspectors also fined Sigma for blocking their legal right to enter the work site to assess conditions — they had to observe the prohibited activity from outside the perimeter. That’s not a compliance gap, that’s active obstruction.
Sigma is Brazil’s largest lithium producer, with the Grota do Cirilo mine — its only productive asset — carrying approximately 270,000 metric tons of annual concentrate capacity. The mine had already been inactive since October following a contractor dispute, and Sigma announced a resumption of operations in February despite the waste pile shutdown still being in effect.Read Full Story
Editors Pick
This is what happens when ideology, bureaucracy, and complacency are put before reality and the preparation for the unknown.
California’s gas crisis is the convergence of three bad trends hitting at once — and the timing couldn’t be worse.
The average cost of regular gas in California is already over $6 — versus a national average of $4.54 — and the state has roughly six weeks of oil supply remaining, with its last tanker shipment from the Middle East delivering just 2 million barrels.
The structural problem predates the Iran conflict. The closures of the Phillips 66 Los Angeles refinery in 2025 and the Valero Benicia refinery in April 2026 together eliminated roughly one-fifth of California’s in-state refining capacity, creating a daily gasoline deficit potentially ranging from 6.6 to 13.1 million gallons. Layer on top of that the Iran-driven crude spike and the Hormuz closure, and you have a supply shock compounding a structural shortage.Read Full Story
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RJ Hamster 