Cybersecurity: The Biggest Overlooked Threat to American Agriculture

On the surface cybersecurity may simply look like spam texts and emails that have no impact on the day-to-day operations or even future of family farms and ranches. However, it’s this mindset that makes it even more of a threat to American agriculture.   

Why Cybersecurity Matters to Family Operations 

Understanding what cyber-criminals are after is the first step of understanding this topic.  

“If you go all the way back to any warfare or any sort of conflict, and the first thing that people go after in times of war is the enemy's food supply,” says Chris Sherman. “In a peacetime, ag is a major target because of the money that's going through it and information we are using.” 

Sherman is the founder of TechSupport.Farm an IT company built for agriculture businesses which specializes in protecting clients from cybersecurity breaches. 

Family operations, while often considered small, still have a large amount of liquidity compared to non-ag small businesses. 

“Normal mom and pop small businesses might have 50,000 in the bank and 100,000 tied up in equipment or assets,” explains Sherman.” But in the farm, we're averaging about 500,000 in just the average checking account. Plus, we have well over a million dollars tied up in infrastructure, equipment and tools.” 

The average age of producers also increases the risk of threats. 

“You'll see the senior generation having a role on the farm and they still control the spending. Unfortunately, the older demographic is far more susceptible to financial fraud than, than any other demographic,” says Sherman. 

Money movements of significant quantities and age demographics are only two of three reasons agriculture is a target of cyber-criminals – technology infrastructure is the third.  

Sherman says, “Essentially, we're running multi-million-dollar operations on residential grade hardware.” 

Consumer-grade routers and cheap laptops don’t have the same quality cybersecurity practice as those designed for businesses handling large quantities of money and data. 

Real Cybersecurity Breach Examples 

Cybersecurity breaches in agriculture don’t often make national news, but that doesn’t they aren’t happening on both small and large scales. 

“We’ve seen where a father and sons are working on a land deal and right before they leave for a weekend trip, they get spoofed eSign documents,” says Sherman. “They all signed them, left and came back to find out they lost all the money and the land deal.” 

A larger scale example shared by Sherman happened near Mankato, MN and did catch the federal governments attention.  

“Essentially, an entire cooperative was held with ransomware during the beginning of harvest,” explains Sherman. “Hundreds of trucks couldn’t unload, scales weren’t working and employees couldn’t clock in or out.” 

These attacks are well-timed and well-orchestrated to cause massive disruption to businesses. 

Action Steps all Family Operations Can Take 

The good news in all of this is there are simple steps individuals can take to protect themselves and their operations.  

A simple first step is to buy a website domain and use it to set up a paid email account that uses encryption.  

Sherman says, “People need to think about free emails like mailboxes. Someone can open the mail, read it, put it back in the envelope and move on without anyone knowing.” 

Next, setting up good passwords on all devices and using multi-factor authentication are necessities. 

“Our recommendation is to have passwords that are a minimum of 12 characters long. Have a couple uppercase and lowercase letters in there and make sure you have some numbers in there and some special characters,” says Sherman. 

Following these requirements has a large impact on how easily the password can be hacked. 

He explains, “Your password will go from being hacked instantaneously to seven minutes or into the years if you add numbers, special characters and upper and lower case letters.” 

Segmenting WiFi also prevents breaches. 

“Have Wi-Fi specifically for your farm operation and have Wi-Fi for your kids and employees,” explains Sherman. “Just like kids coming home from school covered in germs all over their hands, kids are the same way digitally.” 

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to cybersecurity, but these steps are a great start. 

Learn more about what cybersecurity measures you need to take by listening to the full conversation on the Casual Cattle Conversations podcast.