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Something quietly changed in this country over the last 18 months, and most people haven't noticed yet. In November 2025, the National Cyber Security Centre, which is the part of GCHQ that protects British infrastructure, released their annual review. They used a phrase I haven't been able to get out of my head since I read it. "Radical uncertainty." That's not language from a tabloid. That's the language the UK government itself is now using to describe the state of our critical national infrastructure. The National Security Strategy describes the threat environment as one of "radical uncertainty." Here's what's actually been happening, quietly, while most of us have been getting on with our lives. 93% of UK critical national infrastructure operators experienced at least one successful cyber attack in the past year. Not 30%. Not 50%. Ninety-three percent. That's nearly every single organisation responsible for keeping the lights on, the trains running, the hospitals operating, and the water flowing. The NCSC managed 204 significant or highly significant cyber incidents in the year leading up to September 2025. And the part that frankly stopped me in my tracks when I read it: between January 2024 and October 2025, the Drinking Water Inspectorate received 15 reports from British water suppliers about cyber incidents affecting their systems. A record number in any two-year period. Let me say that one more time, because I had to read it twice myself. British drinking water suppliers reported a record number of cyber attacks against their systems in the last 24 months. Now, I want to be careful here. None of those attacks have so far compromised the safe supply of drinking water itself. The water companies have done their job. The systems held. Nobody opened a tap in Birmingham or Manchester or Leeds and got something they shouldn't have. But you have to ask yourself an honest question. How long does that hold? In 2022, a British water utility supplying drinking water to 1.6 million people failed to discover hackers hidden inside its computer network for nearly two years before the intrusion came to light. Two years. Sitting inside the network of a company supplying water to 1.6 million British people. Nobody knew. And in late 2023, in a small town in County Mayo in the Republic of Ireland, pro-Iranian hackers known as the Cyber Av2ngers caused water outages across 160 homes for two days. That last one is the part I want you to sit with. Because what happened in County Mayo wasn't a theoretical risk. It wasn't a war-gaming exercise. It wasn't a worst-case scenario painted by paranoid security consultants trying to sell something. It actually happened. To real families. Forty miles from the UK. In 2023. A hostile group on the other side of the world reached through the internet and switched off the water for 160 households for two days. Just to make a point. And the question every British family should be asking, but almost nobody actually is, is this: what's our plan if something like that happens here? I'll tell you what most people's plan looks like, because it's what mine looked like a year ago. A six-pack of bottled water in the cupboard under the stairs from the last big shop at Tesco. Maybe a couple of two-litre Highland Springs in the fridge. Possibly some long-life cartons left over from a camping trip. That's it. If the water supply went off in your area tomorrow, that's three days. Four if you're rationing. Then what? The water mains might still be flowing, but if there's been a contamination event, or a treatment failure, or a control system breach, what's coming out of your tap isn't safe to drink. Boiling helps with some pathogens. It doesn't help with chemical contamination, and it doesn't reliably kill Cryptosporidium, which is widespread in British water sources. You could drive to the shops. But here's what nobody tells you. Cyber incidents on UK water systems are increasing, and British intelligence has explicitly warned about the rising threat to critical infrastructure. If a major incident hit a population centre, the bottled water aisles at every Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Co-op and Morrisons within a two-hour drive would be cleared out within 12 hours. This is exactly what happens every time. The 2018 Beast from the East emptied supermarket water shelves across Surrey and Kent in less than a day, and that was just burst mains. You could try to find a stream or a river. But every natural water source in this country contains some combination of E. coli, Cryptosporidium, Giardia, agricultural runoff, livestock waste, or industrial contamination. The Environment Agency has been clear for years that virtually no surface water in England, Scotland, or Wales is safe to drink without treatment. So most British families would be stuck between two genuinely bad options. Run out of clean water in three days. Or drink water that might make them seriously ill, at a moment when A&E departments are already overwhelmed. This is the part I've been thinking about for the last six months. Not because I'm a prepper. Not because I think the sky is falling. Just because I read the NCSC's annual review and I read about County Mayo and I read about South Staffordshire Water, and I sat at my kitchen table and asked myself a simple question. If the worst happens, and it's no longer hypothetical that something might happen, am I actually prepared? The honest answer was no. I'm 58 years old. I've got two children and a granddaughter who's four. My daughter lives in Reading. My son lives in Bristol. And until six months ago, none of us had any meaningful plan for what to do if the water stopped being safe. So I started looking. Not at survivalist forums. Not at American prepper websites with bunkers and freeze-dried meals. I'm not interested in that and I don't think it's relevant to British family life. I was looking for something specific. A way to make any water source safe to drink. Without electricity. Without batteries. Without a complicated setup. Something I could keep in a kitchen drawer and not think about until I needed it. What I learnt, after a lot of reading, is that the technology to do this exists, it's not expensive, and it's almost completely unknown to ordinary British households. The British Army uses portable filtration. Every emergency planner I read about mentions it. International aid organisations carry it into disaster zones. It's standard kit in countries that take infrastructure resilience seriously. But ask the average person in Surrey or Yorkshire what a 0.1 micron hollow-fibre membrane is and they'll look at you like you've lost the plot. Here's what it actually is, in plain English. It's a small filter, about the size of a small torch, that contains millions of microscopic hollow fibres. The pores in those fibres are 0.1 microns wide. For context, bacteria are typically 0.2 microns at their smallest, and parasites like Cryptosporidium and Giardia are much larger than that. They physically cannot fit through the holes. They get trapped. Clean water passes through. Everything else stays behind. No electricity. No batteries. No replacement cartridges every six months. The one I keep filters 1,500 litres before it needs replacing. Weighs 60 grams. No shelf life. Works the same in ten years as it does today. You can use it like a straw directly from any freshwater source, or attach it to a bottle. The brand I trust is the ClearX Pro™ from Standby Supply. I've now got one in the kitchen drawer, one in the car, one at my daughter's flat in Reading, and one at my son's place in Bristol. They cost less than a quick shop at Tesco. Lifetime warranty. I've tested mine on stream water from the river near my house, on rainwater from a butt in the garden, on water that frankly looked like nothing I'd want to drink. It works. Every single time. Comes out tasting of nothing. No funny smell. No bits floating in it. Now, I want to be honest about something. I hope I never need it. I genuinely hope the NCSC keeps doing brilliant work. I hope British water companies harden their networks. I hope the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill that's currently going through Parliament makes a real difference. I hope County Mayo turns out to be a one-off. But hope isn't a plan. And when the UK government itself is using the phrase "radical uncertainty" to describe the threat environment, I think it's reasonable for ordinary families to have a backup that doesn't depend on infrastructure that the experts themselves are increasingly worried about. That's all this is. A backup. You probably won't ever need it. I probably won't either. But if you do, you'll need it badly. And by the time you need it, it's far too late to get one. The day the news breaks that a major British water supply has been compromised, the bottled water shelves and the filter websites will be cleared out within hours. We saw exactly that pattern in March 2020. We'll see it again the next time there's a real scare. This is the kind of thing you sort out quietly, on a Tuesday afternoon, while there's no panic and no urgency. So that if the day ever comes that you actually need it, it's already in the drawer. Link below if you want to take a look: https://standbysupplyco.com/products/clearx-pro-water-purifying-straw Stay safe out there, and look after each other. — David P.S. If you've got grandchildren who visit, or elderly parents you check on, or family members in different parts of the country, please think about getting one for each household. They're small. They keep forever. And the families who came through every water emergency in the last decade with the fewest problems were always the ones who'd prepared quietly, in advance, before they needed to.