Agro cyber vulnerabilityU.S. farming sector increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks
America’s farms and agricultural giants are not exempt from cyberattacks, according to officials who spoke at Thursday’s farm-outlook forum hosted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The farming sector is increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks as farmers and agribusinesses rely more on data, with satellite-guided tractors and algorithm-driven planting services expanding across the U.S. Farm Belt. For industrial farmers, data breaches and manipulation are especially worrisome, considering that many rely on new farm-management services that collect information on soil content and past crop yields to generate planting recommendations.
America’s farms and agricultural giants are not exempt from cyberattacks, according to officials who spoke at Thursday’s farm-outlook forum hosted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Monsanto Co. and Deere & Co., along with other seed and farm equipment providers, are investing more in cybersecurity as the farming sector relies more on data, with satellite-guided tractors and algorithm-driven planting services expanding across the U.S. Farm Belt.
“As an industry, we’re still new to it,” said Robert Fraley, Monsanto’s chief technology officer, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Climate Corp., a farm analytics firm acquired by Monsanto, was hacked in 2014, exposing some credit-card and employee information. “We believe this unauthorized access was not an attempt to steal customer information and are not aware of any misuse of the information impacted by the incident,” Climate Corp. spokeswoman Christy Toedebusch wrote in an e-mail last year to Fox Business News.
Today, St. Louis-based Monsanto is consulting with government and cybersecurity firms as it boosts its cyber defenses, but given the frequency and increasing sophistication of hackers, “we’re going to be living in a world where none of that is going to be 100% effective,” Fraley said.
For industrial farmers, data breaches and manipulation are worrisome, considering that many rely on new farm-management services that collect information on soil content and past crop yields to generate planting recommendations, said Mary Kay Thatcher, senior director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation. “Ag companies have already been hacked, and we tell people that,” Thatcher said during a panel discussion at the USDA event. “It will happen, so farmers have to know that.”
Eighty-seven percent of farmers do not have a response plan if a security breach occurred at a company holding their data, according to an October 2014 Farm Bureau survey. Only about one in twenty of those surveyed said that companies managing their information had presented a security-breach plan.
Overall, agriculture has not been a prime target for hackers, said Corey Reed, a senior vice president with Deere, “But there are people around the world waking up every day figuring out how to get into this data.”
