Cyber attack risk in agriculture is increasing

//DH

Cyber threats to food and agriculture are expanding due to the emergence of “smart” farming devices that optimize production capabilities. Farmers can harvest better yields with lower production costs thanks to crop and soil monitoring sensors, autonomous vehicles, and data analytic tools. As a 2018 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report observed, this transformation “took highly mechanical labor-intensive industry and connected it online, dramatically increasing the attack space available to threat actors.”

Ransomware attacks are today’s threat, but malign hackers also have the potential to compromise agriculture data to cause economic, political, or public health crises. For example, many farms use sensors to fertilize and water crops based on soil and weather data. By altering the data, hackers could cause flooding or over-fertilization. On a large enough scale, such an attack could impact the availability of certain crops nationwide. DHS warns that compromises to the data farmers use to track cattle diseases, for example, could take months to remediate. Malicious disruptions to sensors on heating and air conditioning systems could even kill many animals.

The supply chain is also vulnerable. The food and agriculture sector relies heavily on “just in time” transportation, where goods arrive to producers and consumers when they need them. Inventories are kept light, and most goods are in transit. Owing to the consolidation of food distribution in a handful of large companies, cyberattacks on one company can wreak havoc throughout the supply chain. The JBS ransomware attack, for example, forced cattle farmers to slow slaughtering and processing. A ransomware attack on one grain cooperative in Iowa impacted the 40 percent of U.S. grain producers that use its software.