Water-pipeline leakage is one of the most common problems that depletes water supplies. Countries like Jordan, which are really experiencing a water deficit, are particularly concerned about this issue. The lack of monitoring tools makes the underground water-pipeline leakage a challenge since the pipelines are invisible. Besides, reducing the amount of time needed to precisely detect and locate the leak is another challenge. If not reduced, the aforementioned element has an effect on cost. A small broken water distribution line costs $64,000 per year. In Jordan, water leakage costs $1.7 million. This expense can be significantly decreased using an effective early water leak detection system. In this paper, we proposed an efficient internet of things system for detecting water-pipeline leakage based on a shielded pipeline, a NodeMCU, a soil moisture sensor, and the Firebase database. We created a baseline system, and then we tested and evaluated the proposed system when various types of soil are used. Furthermore, this paper compared several strategies offered for detecting water-pipeline leaking including the proposed system. The results showed that the proposed system reduced the time required for detecting water-pipeline leakage by 70% and the system hardware cost by 83% compared with the earlier work. It was difficult to compare the total cost of the proposed system with the total cost of previous works since the total cost is not calculated in their systems.  Besides, in this paper, we proposed an IoT system for securing the underground water pipelines from adversaries.