TEEX Training Takes Root in Washington State’s Cyber Defense
Nicholas Mesagno II flew from Seattle to College Station last year to take a no-cost three-day training course about Cybersecurity Incident Response and Management, and he left with a recruiting strategy he still utilizes today to fortify the State of Washington’s digital safety.
Mesagno serves as cyber resilience specialist for the Washington Emergency Management Division, where he is building a statewide volunteer Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT) from the ground up. After he attended Texas A&M Engineering Extension’s (TEEX) PER-371, Cybersecurity Incident Response and Management course in May 2025, he realized that he could utilize the course even beyond the important incident management training the class provided.
Washington state’s volunteer Cyber Incident Response Team is managed by the state’s Emergency Management Division
“When I first took the class, I was blown away with all the learning that took place in that room. Working in teams in tabletop-like exercises was a beautiful place to practice under fire in a safe environment,” Mesagno said. “That’s what I still tell everybody today, and why I get so many of our volunteers to get trained down there.”
Washington has since sent about a dozen CIRT volunteers to participate in TEEX’s PER-371 course, with more scheduled in waves as members clear time with their employers. Mesagno has interviewed close to 90 CIRT volunteer applicants over the past two years, with another 160 waiting.
“We have tons of people in the pipeline we can’t wait to send there to get training,” Mesagno said. “CIRT is made up of passionate volunteers, a lot of them with full-time work in IT and tech, so when they get their time off approved the first thing I tell them is about this free training in Texas that is well worth the trip.”
One of those volunteers, who also helps run the CIRT, is Garren Shannon. A retired school district IT director, Shannon spent 22 years supporting K-12 technology in Washington and six years at Washington State University before joining the effort as a volunteer. He said most organizations understand cyber risk through one bad experience and rarely see the wider pattern until they have worked on an incident themselves.
“It is hard to articulate to the average person how deep cyber threats are and how they can impact everything, and that cyber-attacks are something we can protect against with real confidence,” Shannon said. “That’s really what the 371 brings to the table.”
A sweeping wave of cyberattacks hit municipal water and wastewater facilities in at least 12 states in late July and early August, and a period of heightened global tension has sharpened attention on operational technology that, in many communities throughout the United States, predates the internet by decades. Vulnerable aging digital systems and poor software management sit at the center of the concern, Shannon said, along with third-party vendor connections that quietly bridge outside networks into utility and school systems that can allow cyberthreats to go undetected and spread quickly.
“When cyberattacks target critical infrastructure, such as water and electrical systems, response cannot happen in isolation,” said Dr. Bart Taylor, TEEX Cybersecurity Program Director. “A unified approach using the Incident Command System brings technical personnel, emergency management, and organizational leadership into a common response structure. PER-371 gives participants hands-on experience working within that structure to contain the incident, protect critical operations, and begin recovery while keeping essential services running.”
TEEX’s PER-371 course runs at no cost to participants through funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Teams train inside a self-contained practice network, or a safe replica of real systems where they can respond to an attack without any risk to actual operations. The scenario hits from several directions at once, with a cybersecurity threat affecting utilities, hospitals, municipal networks and school districts, and it grows more challenging and reacts to what each team does as the exercise unfolds. Shannon noted that takeaways from the course can be applied across all sectors and across state lines, especially when an organization runs a tight budget.
In PER-371, TEEX instructors respond in real time to trainee actions during simulated cybersecurity incidents to stress test responses and adapt like a real digital security breach
“Washington is a wonderful, incredible state, but financially, we are challenged right now,” Mesagno said. “Having a federally funded opportunity like this from TEEX is quite frankly a godsend, because we’re trying to build this response team from scratch. Volunteers are joining out of the goodness of their own hearts and their own concerns for their own communities, so training free of charge is a gamechanger for us and the state.”
Washington’s CIRT plans to take its first missions before the end of the year. Much of the early work will happen before an incident rather than after, through free risk assessments offered to small utilities, rural districts and nonprofits with no security staff of their own.
“We are trying to take what we learned in PER 371 and bring those exercises back home,” Mesagno said. “There’s so much more that needs to be done from a resilience standpoint for our critical infrastructure, and getting folks on board, from school districts, tribal communities, and city governments is half the battle, but with the course we have a model that is proven and works.”
Distributed by:
Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service
Vita Vaughn | Director of Communications
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