That was the message from Janos Botschner, a behavioural scientist and researcher with the Community Safety Knowledge Alliance. Botschner spoke at the CropConnect Conference in Winnipeg on Feb. 12.

“It’s better to talk together and build support with one another than to suffer in silence and maybe be victimized again,” he says.

Because farms and farm equipment are increasingly digitized, real world obscurity doesn’t necessarily offer protection. People on the other side of the world can be as close as neighbours through an internet connection.

In recent years, large companies like JBS, Sollio and Maple Leaf Foods have been targets of cyberattacks. However, Botschner notes, individual producers have also been victimized.

Most cybercriminals are simply looking to make a buck, Botschner says. Some may use ransomware to try to exploit rural communities, small- and medium-scale food processors, farm businesses and other parts of the food value chain. If they try multiple victims, even if only a few respond to demands, they’ll make money.

In the case of the ransomware attack against Maple Leaf Foods, the company later said that total cost to their bottom line ran up to $23 million after hackers locked down their systems and the company refused to pay.

Cybersecurity can be similar to other concepts with which farmers are already familiar, like pest management, livestock health, health and safety and mental health, CropConnect attendees heard. Farmers are often already committed to lifelong learning, risk management and helping one another.

“If we can start to open up our minds and see, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is not that different’ … maybe some baby steps toward cybersecurity can be a little bit more achievable,” Botschner said.

“It’s no one’s shame if something happens because we’re all vulnerable … But the more we know and the more we start to create those frictions, the harder it is for us to just be victimized by a drive-by cyberattack.”

His organization has free, agriculture-specific cybersecurity resources. That includes guidance on how to develop a cybersecurity policy for a farm. Botschner joked that this could be as simple as a sticky note on a dashboard, reminding people to not click links without verifying the sender.

Other resources include basic steps for farm cybersecurity; questions to ask agricultural technology vendors when preparing to buy or subscribe to digital technologies and tips for developing a business continuity plan for cyber incidents.

The post Farming community needs to talk more about cybersecurity appeared first on Grainews.

Losing field data maps and other files, not to mention business and employee records, could become a big problem.

In today’s global environment there are more threats to data than ever. One of them is ransomware. That’s when a hacker gains access to a company’s system and encrypts all its files, then demands a ransom before the owner can regain access.

A 2021 survey of 463 Canadian companies conducted by Telus showed 83 per cent reported an attempted ransomware attack. Most of the surveyed companies reported not just one, but multiple attacks. That was three years ago, and things haven’t improved.

The report concluded this is also a problem for small companies. Seventy-one per cent of the companies surveyed working in the agricultural sector reported being attacked, making that group one of the most frequently targeted.

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One of the top ways criminals gain access is through fake emails containing dangerous attachments, according to the survey.

“Be very, very careful with email,” agrees cybersecurity expert Brennan Schmidt, a principle of AlEUS Consulting Group. “That’s a popular place this tends to happen — through email.”

Criminals often do research into an organization before targeting it, says the report. That can include learning about who works there and how much money the company could afford to pay as a ransom to have their files restored. So, emails could sound legitimate and even include employee names or familiar information to convince someone to open a file that creates a path into an organization’s data files.

While having backups is an important aspect to protecting files against ransomware attacks, just where and how those files are stored is important.

“In a lot of cases backups are so, so important, especially off-line backups,” says Schmidt. “They’re going to be helpful for getting things restored.

“The thing is these cyber tricksters are very eager to go after backups. If folks have elected to go with a backup on the network. In some cases, they (criminals) will scour the network and make sure to hit the backups too.”

Schmidt says cloud services like Microsoft 365 are a consideration for farm organizations to use for backing up data, because they offer enhanced protection from cyberattacks.

“It’s a lot more difficult to delete or alter. For a farming operation you’d likely want to think about going with something that’s a bit more commercial grade (than iCloud. Especially if you have multiple employees, you don’t want to be using that consumer grade service for that larger scale. There are a whole host of them.”

But even those cloud services aren’t immune from cyberattacks. The number of attacks against them has been on the rise, according to the Telus report.

Because farms often use digital files from other services, like agronomy firms, it’s possible for an attack to come through a vulnerability in their systems.

“When you go with a specific supplier or vendor, you’re really beholden to how well the vendor has designed its systems to be safe,” says Schmidt.

Paying a ransom to a cybercriminal doesn’t guarantee you’ll get your files back. Only 42 per cent of those in the Telus survey who reported being attacked claimed they got all their data back after paying a ransom. Seven per cent didn’t get anything. Over 60 per cent were victimized again.

There are other non-criminal ways to lose data as well, such as a fire in a farm office where a computer and backups are kept, or just a simple computer failure.

Schmidt says there is value in having everyone in the farm organization sit down and discuss how to deal with a loss of data.

“A handful of folks that are part of the same operation get together at the same table to facilitate an exercise where you ask a series of questions, if this was to happen, what do you have in place to respond to that? A lot of times when you do those activities, you find there are a lot of gaps that can be shored up.

“For producers, I think tabletops are a great way to say I have all of this technology here and if it went down, here’s how we would go about doing a backup operation.”

Working to avoid being a victim is the first step to protecting data. Training employees to be suspicious of emails and attachments, as well as using multi-factor authentication for online access are good starting points.

Schmidt adds that keeping some systems separate can be helpful.

“Try to get away from plugging things into networks for them to work. For example, if you have a camera you use to watch cattle or something. It might be better to get that on a separate network

“It really comes down to simple things folks don’t generally tend to do.”

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Brian Osterndorff, chair of the board of the Canadian Equipment Dealers Association, and president and CEO of Robert’s Farm Equipment, a seven-store group in Ontario, said on June 26 that they had just been informed that they could use the system again.

Tech firm CDK’s software was taken offline last week after a cyberattack by the BlackSuit ransomware group. CDK is being asked to pay tens of millions of dollars by the hackers. Reuters reported yesterday that the company expected dealers to be offline until at least June 30, but some dealers had functionality returned on June 26.

CDK provides business management software to dealers of all makes of farm equipment, so major dealers of John Deere, CNH and are working without digital systems across the country. CDK is also the leading provider of management software to automobile dealers and thousands of those dealerships are offline.

CDK says it has 15,000 North American dealers on its system.

Wawanesa, Man. farmer Jeff Elder said he was able to get what he needed on a recent parts run to the Rocky Mountain Equipment dealership in Brandon, however staff were relying on memory to find parts or looking them up on their phones.

“They had resorted to writing down orders on paper,” said Elder via text. “He couldn’t invoice me and said I would receive an invoice by email whenever they could get that done.”

Rocky Mountain Equipment declined to comment.

“Everything is being done manually,” said John Schmeiser, President of the North American Equipment Dealers Association (NAEDA) Canada. “You can just imagine the amount of time that our dealerships are spending on manual processes.”

Parts are tracked and managed through digital inventory systems.

“We have to actually know where the part is, in, in a bin, to go out and find it and fulfill that customer’s order without using our computer system to tell us where it is or how many that we have on order.”

Invoicing also has to be manual, said Schmeiser.

Osterndorff said that looking up parts, connecting parts to work orders and completing sales couldn’t be accomplished using their digital system and staff had to do the work manually.

Farmers are spraying and preparing combines for harvest so dealers continue to work as best they can.

“We can’t shut down the business, we have to take care of the customer,” Schmeiser said. “Dealers are really managing through this as best as they possibly can.”

Osterndorff says they have a team of people coming to dig out from the past week’s paperwork and get that information into the digital system.

He says they’ve learned that dealerships can continue to function, “but I think it’s just increased awareness right now of the vulnerability that we all are all have, and the effect that it has in our business.”

Schmeiser said the situation will be a wake-up call for the industry and will place even more emphasis on cyber security.

“I think as an industry as a whole, this whole situation is going to be looked at, at every sector, from the manufacturer point of view and the equipment dealer,” he said.

“We’re asking our customers or farm customers to be a little bit patient with our dealers, as we work through this problem. This is this is an issue that is not only frustrating for our equipment dealers, but can be frustrating for our customers as well.”

—Updated June 27 – adds John Schmeiser’s title, organization.

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“It’s unbelievable the amount of cases that have come through our organization in the last year and a half,” says Jonathan Neutens, head of agriculture at ATB Financial. “I don’t know what the percentage would be, but it’s large.”

He discussed the issue as one of the speakers at the recent CrossRoads Crop Conference in Calgary.

“Fraud prevention is something I think is starting to be considered as it relates to the future of finance, for sure.”

Neutens said during an interview that he wasn’t sure of all the reasons behind the increase in fraud, which involves “all of the banking world” as well as victims besides the agriculture industry. He said criminals are devising new ways to ensnare people as financial institutions implement tougher safeguards.

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He pointed to measures such as two-factor authentication that requires two separate, distinct forms of identification to prevent thieves from gaining access to online banking accounts. He said criminals have gone beyond phishing emails and smishing text messages, which impersonate legitimate sources to trick people into revealing sensitive data such as passwords or credit card numbers.

“We’ve had that occur where someone does a Google search for ATB, clicks on the top link, and the top link happens to be a fraudulent website that looks exactly like ATB’s. And you put in your information, you log in and they’ve got you, and then all they have to do is log into your account and change contact information so they get the two-factor authentication versus you, and then they can start firing up electronic payments.”

People should always double check the source of emails and texts, said Neutens.

“Sometimes the email address or the website address, it might only have one letter that’s different.”

A good practice is to directly type the correct URL for your financial institution into the address bar on your browser to conduct online banking, he said. It’s also wise to make 100 per cent sure you haven’t received a phishing email or a smishing text, even if you must first make a phone call to your financial institution or other legitimate source, he added.

Phishing emails can look exactly like those of someone familiar, such as a supplier, which could be due to the supplier’s email account being hacked, said Neutens.

“And if their email is hacked, (criminals) watch for the conversation style or what have you, and eventually they send you an email and they say, ‘oh, by the way, you need to change payment to this account, and click on this to make the payment’,” he said.

“If you click on something like that, and that takes you into your online banking or whatever it is and you do your two-factor authentication, then they’re watching it, and they’ve got it.”

ATB is working to improve its ability to detect fraudulent transactions more quickly by increasing the number of staff devoted to the problem, said Neutens. But if someone gets login information and changes a two-factor authentication, “there’s really nothing we can do about that because they’ve got it from you in some way, shape or form.

“We can’t stop that because that’s outside of our systems and outside of our control, and then they come in and they log in like it’s you. How is the banking system going to know the difference?”

Reality cheque

However, Neutens said the largest source of fraud involves cheques, and is a growing problem. One of the more interesting scams targets people who send cheques through the mail, he said.

“They’ve written a cheque to someone like John Deere, or whatever, like to a supplier, and that cheque gets stolen … a new cheque is done up basically using that bank account information with the same dollar amount, but to a different payee, so when the cheque clears, the customer sees the cheque clear and thinks it’s cleared until the supplier calls him and says, ‘Hey, when are you going to pay me?’”

Such crimes have cost some producers tens of thousands of dollars, said Neutens.

“It’s pretty often that farmers can cut a cheque to someone for $40,000, $50,000 or $60,000, and so yeah, we’ve had that.”

Modernizing the funding and payment system by moving away from cheques would be the easiest part of the solution to implement, and producers should stop using cheques if possible, Neutens said in an interview.

“They’re just too risky these days, so if you move away from cheques, do that and get into your online and EFTs (electronic fund transfers) and all that kind of stuff with two-factor authentication, and then just make freaking sure you understand what smishing is, you understand what phishing is, you understand how the fraudsters work,” he said.

“And we have those resources. You can reach out to us at ATB and we’ll give you the resources to help you understand and get trained up on what that is so that you can hopefully not get caught in one of these situations.”

Hacks and hustles

Phishing: One of the most common types of cyber fraud. Hackers use fake emails or text messages that trick users into sharing personal information such as bank details.

Smishing: Deceptive text messages that lure victims into sharing personal or financial information, clicking on malicious links or downloading harmful software or applications.

Malware: Malicious software such as a virus that can destroy, damage or exploit computers or computer systems.

Worms: A malicious software that replicates itself and spreads from computer to computer. Unlike viruses, worms do not need to be attached to a computer program to do damage. They work silently and infect the device without the user’s knowledge.

Ransomware: Cyber criminals use it to lock a device or steal information. They then demand a ransom to restore access or return the information. Payment is usually demanded as a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin.

Spyware: Malicious software that infiltrates a device and monitors activity. Criminals can then steal logins, passwords and credit card information.

Trojan horse viruses: Code or software that looks legitimate but can take control of a computer.

Distributed denial of service attacks: Occurs when hackers attempt to make a website or computer unavailable by flooding it with internet traffic.

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Instead of cash, the attackers demanded the hog business owners publicly admit to what they alleged to be livestock mistreatment.

The occurrence was unique and alarming, says Ali Dehghantanha, Canada research chair in cybersecurity and threat intelligence at the University of Guelph’s Cyber Science Lab.

The lab offers a for-fee support service for those managing cyberattacks and cybersecurity.

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While the number of cybersecurity incidents across Ontario’s agriculture industry has been rapidly increasing overall, he says the cashless ransomware attack against the family hog business — an incident he and his colleagues helped the family resolve — highlights what could become a wider trend in the tactics used by special interest actors.

Why it matters: Ransomware and other criminal cyber activities usually come with demands for payment. Malicious actors focused on disrupting food production rather than money pose another, potentially harder-to-solve threat.

According to Dehghantanha, the attack perpetrators claimed to have a variety of incriminating evidence showing animal abuse on the farm. This included camera footage taken from what the perpetrators claimed was a now-compromised farm surveillance system. The attacker’s prerequisite for releasing their hold on the farm’s network was a public statement, from the business owners, admitting to animal abuse.

In Dehghantanha’s view, this would have been financially devastating for the business.

In reality, no such footage existed. Indeed, claims of comprised cameras were false. Barring the demand for self-incrimination, the attack proved to be a standard, easily manageable ransomware attack.

“This was the first time working in this specific industry we have seen ransomware not asking for money. That would make our job much more difficult as we are dealing with adversaries whose motivation is not money,” Dehghantanha says, adding the transfer of cash is often the riskiest part for those committing ransomware attacks, because the movement of funds can be tracked.

“Prior to this we were not concerned with these small family food businesses…There was not a playbook for these kinds of situations.”

More accessible ransomware

Dehghantanha says his lab has been engaged with 20 cybersecurity issues reported from southern Ontario in the first half of 2023 alone — up from a mere handful in the entirety of 2019. Awareness of cyber risk has likely played a role in higher reporting, but it’s also getting easier for bad actors to acquire harmful attack tools like ransomware.

Simultaneously, the agriculture and food sector are underprepared for such threats. Dehghantanha considers agriculture and food to lag other sectors, notably energy and health, by approximately five years. Remedying the problem would begin by establishing a committee or another body of industry representatives, technology experts, and others to design cybersecurity standards “rooted in the reality of the industry.”

“We must identify steps for farmers and businesses that can be gradually achieved to get to the same level. This has happened in energy and health sector so there’s no reason it can’t happen in agriculture sector,” says Dehghantanha.

“We need to identify a body responsible for receiving these standard reports from farmers trying to evaluate them and give feedback and work with them…If a farmer knows they are level two, level three, or whatever level they are, it would make it much easier for them to understand and improve.”

Awareness and practice

Stakeholders in the agriculture sector, such as Ontario Pork, say they are raising awareness about the ever-growing need for better cybersecurity.

In an email statement received July 12, Ken Ovington, general manager for Ontario Pork, says the commodity group “routinely meets with cybersecurity experts and researchers to gather knowledge that can be used to create awareness and provide informational tools that are valuable to pork producers and the provincial pork industry.

“These types of cyberattacks are undeniably on the rise. As technology usage increases, so does the methods and sophistication of cyber criminals so it’s crucial that producers, agricultural organizations and government continue to prioritize cybersecurity measures, stay vigilant, and collaborate to prevent future cyberattacks,” says Ovington.

Strategies used to prevent issues within the organization itself were listed as well, including cybersecurity training for employees. No comment on specific incidents, such as the ransomware attack on the family hog operation, was provided.

Dehghantanha himself encourages greater proactivity. While establishing standards would help the agriculture sector improve overall security – and, potentially, bring spinoff benefits like lower insurance rates for higher cybersecurity scores – he stresses individuals and organizations need to pay attention to the threat posed by cyber criminals focused on industry disruption over money.

“We don’t need to wait for a standard to work on awareness. If you have livestock, you could be on a target list.”

— Matt McIntosh is a southwestern Ontario freelance writer. This article previously appeared at Farmtario.com.

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The company on Thursday released that estimate as part of its fourth-quarter financial report, in which it booked a Q4 net loss of $41.49 million on $1.186 billion in sales and a full-year net loss of $311.89 million on $4.739 billion in sales.

During its fourth quarter, on Nov. 6, 2022, Mississauga-based Maple Leaf confirmed it was hit with a “system outage stemming from a cybersecurity incident.”

In Thursday’s report, the company reiterated it “took immediate action and engaged cybersecurity and recovery experts” upon learning of the attack, and “executed its business continuity plans” as it restored affected systems.

Maple Leaf said it was able to maintain operations throughout the event and work with customers and suppliers to “minimize service disruptions,” but nevertheless, its “normal business activities were interrupted.”

With that came the expenses of “system restoration costs, lost sales, overtime, spoiled inventory” and professional fees paid to its experts, the company said.

The company on Thursday estimated fourth-quarter “direct and indirect economic impact” of “at least” $23 million relating to the incident.

Maple Leaf also said it expects to recover some of those costs through related insurance payouts later in 2023. CEO Michael McCain said those amounts can’t yet be booked into the company’s financial results but the company is “very confident” it will be able to recoup some of those costs.

Asked Thursday about the nature of the cybersecurity attack, a company spokesperson said via email the attackers in this case “did try to extort a ransom from us and we refused to pay.”

Maple Leaf in November reported “operational and service disruptions that vary by business unit, plant and site.”

The company’s operations in Canada include hog slaughter plants at Brandon, Man. and Lethbridge, Alta.; five fresh poultry plants in Ontario and one at Edmonton; hatcheries in Ontario and Alberta; five feed mills in Manitoba; and pork and poultry further-processing sites in five provinces. The company recently opened a major new poultry plant at London, Ont.

As for its livestock production, “our farms have adjusted their practices due to the system outage, and we feel confident in our ability to care for our animals and meet their needs,” Maple Leaf said at the time.

On a call with market analysts Thursday, McCain said the $23 million estimate reflects a combination of “incremental” costs incurred as a result of the company’s “entire team” shifting its focus to deal with the incident.

Within less than 48 hours of the attack being discovered, he said, staff were able to shift operations to “fully manual… essentially paper-and-pencil” while company information systems were cleaned and rebooted.

While the company didn’t use the word in its report, the nature of the attack points to ransomware — a form of malware that either encrypts a targeted computer system’s files, rendering them unusable, or removes a system’s sensitive data.

A ransom, usually payable in cryptocurrency, is then demanded of the system’s owner, in exchange for a decryption key or the missing data.

Maple Leaf’s outage isn’t the first ransomware attack in Canada’s meat packing sector. Canadian operations of Brazilian meat packer JBS briefly halted in the summer of 2021 when that company’s U.S. arm was hit by what was later confirmed to be a ransomware attack.

However, where Maple Leaf says it refused to pay, the CEO of JBS USA later confirmed the company did pay a cryptocurrency ransom equivalent to about US$11 million.

Andre Nogueira was quoted by Reuters at the time as saying “we felt this decision had to be made to prevent any potential risk for our customers.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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UPA, in a release last Thursday, said it’s working with a cybersecurity firm to analyze the nature and scope of the attack, as well as any possible solutions to securely restore its affected systems.

UPA oversees 130 different unions of producers organized by commodity within 25 specialized affiliated groups, and represents the province’s 42,000-odd farmers and forestry producers regionally through 90 locals within 12 regional federations.

The organization said the Aug. 7 attack affected UPA servers, files and relevant computer applications — and also affects “several” of those UPA-affiliated commodity-specific and region-specific bodies.

Ransomware is a form of malware that encrypts a targeted computer system’s files, rendering them unusable, or removes a system’s sensitive data. A ransom, usually payable in cryptocurrency, is then demanded of the system’s owner, in exchange for a decryption key or the missing data.

UPA didn’t say in Thursday’s release whether it had paid, or has been asked to pay, any ransom. It said measures were taken when the incident was discovered, so as to limit the attack’s reach.

UPA added that it won’t release further details publicly, so as to keep its further investigation confidential and running smoothly.

It would only say the farm-level activities of agricultural businesses “are not compromised” by the attack — and that “all actions” required to protect the interests of the UPA, its members, its staff and its affiliate organizations are being considered.

According to Dr. Janos Botschner of the Guelph-based Community Safety Knowledge Alliance, ransomware often enters systems via phishing — that is, creating a bogus email, made to appear like it comes from a legitimate organization, including a link which grants hackers access — or via “credential stuffing,” that is, using stolen credentials from a legitimate source.

Ag and agrifood industries and policymakers are coming around to the need to deal with vulnerabilities at the farm or processor level, Botschner said on an episode of Between The Rows in December.

Organizations running on older or outdated software, for example, are a “juicy target” for ransomware, he said.

At the farm level, ensuring cybersecurity means farmers need to make sure their technology can ward off three main kinds of threats, Dr. Ali Dehghantanha of the University of Guelph’s Cyber Science Lab said in a separate release Wednesday.

Apart from ransomware, those threats include theft of confidential information — that is, anything from livestock feeding schedules to greenhouse temperatures — and vandalism by foreign actors designed to disrupt businesses’ networks.

Interrupting farm supply chains, for instance, may mean farmers lose crops and ultimately lose time and money in replacing them, Dehghantanha said. “Any disruption of infrastructure could cause disruption of the supply chain and affect food security.”

However, he said in the same release, “the level of cybersecurity protection in agriculture is minimal to non-existent… The agricultural sector is a soft underbelly from a cybersecurity point of view.”

Major ag-related targets of ransomware attacks in the past couple of years have included the U.S. (and Canadian) arm of meat packer JBS; farm equipment manufacturer Agco; and at least three U.S. grain handlers.

“Everyone or every business is potentially vulnerable, regardless of the size, and being in an out-of-the-way, rural location doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily secure,” Botschner said in December. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Georgia-based Agco, whose brands include Massey Ferguson, Fendt, Challenger and Valtra, said in a statement it expects operations at some facilities to be affected for “several days and potentially longer.”

The ransomware attack comes at a time U.S. agricultural equipment makers were already facing persistent supply chain disruptions and labour strikes that left them unable to meet equipment demand from farmers.

Agco did not disclose the names of the facilities or if any data was stolen, but said it was still probing the extent of the attack that occurred on Thursday and working to repair its systems.

Tim Brannon, president and owner of B+G Equipment in Tennessee, told Reuters he has not been able to access Agco’s website for ordering and looking up parts since Thursday morning.

“We just have to trust that it will be over as soon as possible because we are coming into our busiest time of the year and it will be very damaging to our business and customers,” Brannon said.

Agco, which competes with larger rival Deere and Co., sells tractors and combines and manufactures and assembles products in 42 locations worldwide with 1,810 dealerships in North America.

Dealers are now struggling to keep up with orders that were already backlogged.

The company told dealers that it was “prioritizing” the most business-critical systems in an email read to Reuters by a dealer who declined to be identified.

“I’ve got about nine orders that I need to place right now,” the dealer said.

He said Agco told him “digital systems” had been impacted worldwide.

Agco did not respond to requests for additional comment.

Ransomware attacks have targeted food and fuel companies in the U.S. in recent years, including the Colonial Pipeline oil network and meat processing company JBS. Last autumn, at least three grain handlers in the Midwest were hit with ransomware attacks.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nathan Gomes in Bangalore and Bianca Flowers and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago.

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The Community Safety Knowledge Alliance, the lead organization on the Cyber Security Capacity in Canadian Agriculture project, has put up a voluntary online survey for farm operators, running until Feb. 18, “to look at how farmers understand and experience cybersecurity in their day-to-day work.”

Data from the survey — which is believed to be the first “comprehensive” survey of cybersecurity focusing on the Canadian farm sector — “will be used to develop information and recommendations to help farmers safeguard their operations,” the CSKA said.

The CSKA said its survey “draws from work carried out in Canada and elsewhere, to help us better understand how farmer experiences in this country compare to other areas and sectors.”

The survey is confidential and no personally identifying information will be attached to any reports resulting from it, the CSKA said.

The federal public safety ministry last March funded the project via the national Cyber Security Co-operation Program. The CSKA is a not-for-profit organization that works with private- and public-sector organizations to research, evaluate, train and promote in the field of community safety.

Glacier FarmMedia (GFM), owner of this website and publications including Country Guide, Grainews and the Western Producer, announced last April it would collaborate with CSKA to help further extend the ag project’s reach.

Cybersecurity, for the purpose of this project, refers to “steps taken to protect computer systems, communications technology or devices connected through the internet or a network” from disruptions, whether “accidental or intentional.”

Cybersecurity in the farm and agribusiness sectors lit up on the public radar in 2021 following ransomware attacks on businesses including international meat packer JBS.

CSKA lead investigator Dr. Janos Botschner said last April that Canada’s ag and food sectors can be considered critical infrastructure in the same sense as water and electricity supplies, telecommunications and financial services.

Ag and food, he said, “is a little bit newer to digital technology than other sectors are, but it may end up moving toward digitalization faster than the others have had to.”

Glacier FarmMedia, the CSKA and Public Service Canada hosted a webinar Monday for farmers on cybersecurity in farm businesses, and will host a sequel online on Feb. 17. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The Communications Security Establishment (CSE), citing attacks on North American health facilities and a U.S. pipeline, said the scale and scope of ransomware operators represented both security and economic risks to Canada and its allies.

Ransomware and related cybersecurity issues took on added significance in the agriculture and agribusiness sectors following attacks on U.S. ag input and grain handling operations and multinational meat packer JBS earlier this year.

“Ransomware operators will likely become increasingly aggressive in their targeting, including against critical infrastructure,” said a report issued by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, a unit of CSE.

The agency said it knew of 235 ransomware incidents against Canadian victims from Jan. 1 to Nov. 16 this year. More than half of these victims were critical infrastructure providers.

In 2021, the global average total cost of recovery from a ransomware incident has more than doubled to $2.3 million.

“Ransom payments are likely reaching a market equilibrium, where cybercriminals are becoming better at tailoring their demands to what their victims are most likely to pay,” CSE said.

The agency reiterated previous statements that actors in Russia, China and Iran posed a major threat.

“Russian intelligence services and law enforcement almost certainly maintain relationships with cybercriminals, either through association or recruitment, and allow them to operate with near impunity as long as they focus their attacks against targets located outside Russia,” it said.

— Reporting for Reuters by David Ljunggren in Ottawa.

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