Is Hacking the Next Struggle for Agriculture?
agweek.com
agweek.com
A reminder: many are pushing for this for the sole purpose in cashing in the froth from a over-heated stock market doing no amount of due diligence or looking to the Infrastructure's many pork project with headlong abandon instead of focusing on the actual Industry's needs. It's also a highlight and remind why Theranos is in the media, too.
Anyhow, after taking the summer to focus on what pressing upgrades Ag appears to need after the Supply Chain and labour disruptions during and after COVID I came to the conclusion that automation, while effective and remarkably capable of delivering many advantages to a myriad of existing issues, alone isn't the turn-key panacea it's made out to be by the supposed AI techno-utopians financing, investing and building these products.
And when looking at how efficient it is deploying a ransomware attack and bricking a poorly protected system came to mind, why do physical attacks when a decent vector (like Ransomware) will have a really good ROI without the risk. And COVID exposed just how poorly designed these systems are everything from how bad they are at keeping people safe, to the logistical challenges from farm to processor, what was missed in the discussion was operational security.
Ironically, I thought COVID would have made the resources come pouring in from all the money that flooded the system, but I suppose updating centralized, archaic infrastructure and practices that leak info everywhere was too practical a use to do with resources?
Still, this is another nail in the coffin of the centralized architecture that most of Ag is built on.
I understand people's immediate response is to question the IT support team's competence and wag fingers for not having backups (this doesn't apply to the Co-OP in the title who was agile enough to route around it) for such a common event these days. And while that's a valid position to have, it's entirely shortsighted: it's more like people didn't realize that the OPSEC component of the equation in automating more processes in the system was much more important than the actual deployment of said solutions.
Maybe it's just my innate paranoia since the advent of IoT or the ever increasing intrusiveness of enabling everything to be connected to the Internet and requiring more and more of your data, but it's clear the analog World's methods are at direct odds with the digital one's in more ways than we thought and a total overhaul of the system is required.
I was a big advocate of IBM's food safety program [0], mainly because they had the resources to expend in trying to figure how Blockchains could solve many of these issues, which is why I joined. They had a lot of support from Megacorps, too, so you cannot imagine my dismay when they sought to simply re-invent the same problems with regards to OPSEC with centralized private ledgers, and closed-blockchains that simply recreated the same issues they were trying to solve.
Decentralization has become a buzzword for many in this space, but for it's biggest advocates like myself we haven't even scratched the surface when trying to make people understand how critically vulnerable these systems are until it's too late and this will happen again.
How they've concluded it was 'Russian hackers' notwithstanding, these kind of exploits are cheap, quick to deploy and have a high ROI, they will continue to happen more often.
In many ways I'm reminded of why I used to say in 2013, when I started to take infosec and opsec serious that the Somali pirates had better invested some of the funds into devs because the age of risk tolerance for hi-jacking tankers was coming to an end when you could make way more money deploying a ransom-ware attack or some other hidden exploit. Everything from Stuxnet, to Heart bleed, to Vault7 made it clear that this how provate or nation states were going going to attack one another.
The Voodoo Boys narrative in Cyberpunk2077 was an apt metaphor of what I envisioned could occur if left unchecked, where displaced and downtrodden Haitian refugees are left to use exploits to make-ends-meet in a Society that has marginalized them to the outer fringes of Society and live in an escapable poverty, violence and lawlessness. I'm glad to say we aren't there yet, but this Cyberpunk trope has been a recurring theme for a reason.