Cyber Defense in Ag

Disruption is nothing new to the agriculture industry. Farmers and ranchers are accustomed to dealing with flooding, drought, fluctuating commodity prices and more. The latest threat to the ag and food industry is of a different variety, in the form of cyber attacks.

Noah Korba, Director of Cyber Security at General Mills, talks about what makes the food and ag industry vulnerable to such attacks.  “Speaker1: We've got a lot of different types of operational technologies we talked about, they just weren't ever built to withstand cyber attacks, and that makes it kind of hard for us to devise ways to protect those.”

 

Korba says, like many industries, the cyber security industry is lacking in overall employment and does not meet the needs of the cyber security sector today. “Speaker1: There's a lot of numbers that get thrown around. I'm not going to quote any of them because it's hard to know like exactly how bad the problem is. But I can confidently say we've got way more job openings and cybersecurity than there are people that can fill it right now. And then that puts us in a pretty bad position of. We've got a lot of things to do and we don't have enough people to do it. I know that probably sounds familiar, as in many other organizations, in many other fields.”