Talk of cyberattacks on national infrastructure often brings to mind pipelines being shut down, banking services disrupted, or health services having their data stolen. However, a less talked-about but equally damaging target can be a nation’s food supply, and hackers have increasingly made businesses in that field a target, according to an article in The Financial Post. In particular, farms are becoming popular victims for hackers, especially those sponsored by states.
Says Ali Dehghantanha, who runs the Cyber Science Lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, about the growth in attacks on the food supply, “They’ve just become so common. Every week, I would say, we are getting contacted by farmers or food companies. It’s one of the soft bellies of our critical infrastructure.”
Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, is also aware of the general weakness of security within the increasingly computerized sector. Says Fraser, “These are all systems that we explicitly depend on every single day, and they have become extremely vulnerable to manipulation of all sorts. They’re vulnerable because we haven’t thought carefully about the security of how we set these systems up. I mean, it’s truly terrifying, to be honest.”
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