As Internet-connected equipment is increasingly used in many industry sectors, alerts like the latest one issued by the FBI to US farmers will likely become a regular occurrence.
“While precision agriculture technology (a.k.a. smart farming) reduces farming costs and increases crop yields, farmers need to be aware of and understand the associated cyber risks to their data and ensure that companies entrusted to manage their data, including digital management tool and application developers and cloud service providers, develop adequate cybersecurity and breach response plans,” the FBI and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)
warn.
Farming cyber risks
The FBI and USDA believe that cyber attackers might target individuals and entities in the farming industry:
- To steal farm-level data in bulk (information about soil content, past crop yields, planting recommendations, etc.) or to destroy it in protest
- To encrypt collected data and hold it for ransom (with ransomware)
- To disrupt food production and processing (by messing with plants’ Industrial Control Systems).
