Publisher & Editor in Chief

Jayne Lytel

From newsroom to fiction to code.

Jayne Lytel is publisher and editor in chief of The Big Drop. She is also an author and cybersecurity professional whose fiction draws on her experience in artificial intelligence, investigative journalism, and cybersecurity.

As Chief AI Architect at capMedia Inc., Jayne brings a decade in cybersecurity as a federal contractor—including four years at Booz Allen Hamilton—and an AI Fellowship at the R42 Institute.

Her path to writing wound through the newsroom of The Washington Post, where she worked as a copy editor. She served as Washington Deputy Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor Inc. and wrote the syndicated Internet911 column for United Features Syndicate for five years.

Lytel is author of Act Early Against Autism (Perigee, 2008). Her debut psychological eco-thriller, Run From Sunday, is forthcoming by Bold Story Press.

In October 1993, Jayne founded the first newsletter chronicling the Internet's commercial rise—a publication where the CIA called her and invited her to visit headquarters, which she did.

Beyond her professional work, Jayne is a member of the National Press Club and serves on the Club's Press Freedom advisory board. She conceived and developed the Baby Brain Map, an interactive adaptation of Erikson Institute's Brainwonders for child brain development.

The worst news of the day, every day.

The Big Drop is a daily interstitial on the Pipeline Infrastructure Daily map. Each issue pulls the day's worst pipeline-and-data-center news into one short briefing—what changed, why it matters, and what it would take to change back.

The recurring "How Bad Is It?" sidebar drills into one specific vulnerability in U.S. pipeline infrastructure per issue. It identifies the vulnerability and the manufacturer, reports current measurable exposure from Shodan, scores the likelihood on a transparent rubric, and tells the reader what a realistic worst case looks like. The numbers are date-stamped and re-checked each week, so trendlines—not single snapshots—drive the meter.

How the numbers are produced.

ICS exposure counts are pulled from Shodan and enriched per IP through Shodan's free InternetDB lookup. Counts are date-stamped and reproducible by anyone with a Shodan account.

Vulnerability provenance is anchored to primary sources: CISA ICS advisories and NIST's National Vulnerability Database. Every CVE in a sidebar links back to its CISA or NVD page.

Market and grid data come from EIA (Henry Hub, citygate, grid monitor) and ERCOT (interconnection queue)—all public, all linked.

The risk meter uses a six-input rubric: CVSS severity, US exposure count, presence of unauthenticated industrial protocol traffic, exploit triviality, vendor-patch availability, and CISA KEV listing. Inputs and the resulting bucket are disclosed in each issue.

Physical-failure context comes from a curated layer of U.S. Chemical Safety Board investigations at refineries, gas plants, and terminals—each pin's coordinate traced to an EPA registry record or facility address, and each linked to its CSB report. It shows what a control-system failure looks like at the sites the map already tracks; The Big Boom maps and catalogs every one.

Operator naming. The Big Drop reports aggregate exposure by product and geography; it does not name a specific pipeline operator as "vulnerable" without per-IP verification and a direct request for comment.

The making of The Big Drop.

Disclosure To devise The Big Drop, the author used generative AI and numerous API keys and MCP servers and combined it with her knowledge of industrial control systems and cybersecurity. AI assists with research synthesis, code generation for the data pipeline, and prose drafting. All facts are anchored to primary sources linked in the issue. Editorial judgment by and large is discreet and related to the daily interstitial. Verify any information if you plan to act on it.

Jayne Lytel

The worst news of the day, every day.

How the numbers are produced.

The making of The Big Drop.