Chickens, cows, threatened in Ransomware on Canadian farms | Hacker News Reader

Chickens, cows, threatened in Ransomware on Canadian farms

financialpost.com

90 pointscameron_b64 comments

"Farms are now complex technical operations that use networks of remote monitors that measure soil moisture, or robotic milkers that can detect an infection in a single teat, or environmental control systems that maintain the precise indoor temperature and air filtration needs of a poultry barn."

Both a completely understandable and even desirable outcome of advancements in animal husbandry, and an unacceptably vulnerable solution to a massively important system where low-tech solutions are well available.

Modern massive farming requires tech to be efficient? That feels like a reasonable statement though I have no proof of it. Maintaining or improving farm output at scale requires massive centralized farming? That feels like less of a reasonable statement, and again, I have no proof one way or another.

Are there studies on this? Can we decentralize, downscale, without compromising outputs?

Just ruminating here (pun definitely intended).

If you're going to do the high tech intensive route, though, then you must needs also have a security expert on staff, and I bet you that's a rare thing.

Forget a security expert, from what I've witnessed in a lot of industries security can be improved 100 fold by simply listing to what any half decent IT staff would recommend. So many business still think its ok to have a single login off a vital system with a 4 character password shared amongst 30 employees.

Pretty much every production improvement in either farming or manufacture since the 19th century has been:

- scaling up is more efficient, because the production increase has a better "slope" than the increased capital investment

- increasing uniformity is more efficient, through the means of statistical process control, which requires more information and information processing

Is there any goods-producing industry that is more efficient by being decentralized? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really not sure.

And I don't mean software, media, IP, etc. but stuff like milk or meat or lumber or micro chips.

Ginseng is an interesting one [0]. It can be farmed without too much trouble, but farmed ginseng has a more uniform, smoother appearance than wild ginseng. One of the major uses is in Chinese traditional medicine, where it's believed that wild ginseng has better properties (exactly what properties and how you measure them is hard to pin down).

This leads to a tension: You can set up an efficient, high yield, centralized farm, but your main buyers will value your crop less. Or you can use "simulated wild" conditions that create a wild-like appearance and charge more, but now you need a very different operation that looks more like forestry than farming and is much more likely to be decentralized. And of course you can still forage, but that has its own limitations (lots of details in [0]).

[0]: https://www.uky.edu/ccd/sites/www.uky.edu.ccd/files/ginseng....

Certain rapid prototyping can be faster by being decentralised, but this results in higher per-unit costs. It's cheaper to 3D print than do injection moulding if you just want one item, but not if you want 10,000.

You know the old saying in computing, "Fast, Cheap, Good - pick two"?

That applies to farming too.

If you're okay with paying roughly 50% more across the board in the supermarket, then farming can be rather less dependent on technology.

Also if you are okay with many starving to death. There are more then 8 billion people on earth who need to eat

Spoke to a few farmer friends. They tell me that large scale operations are very technically complex and have many digital systems deployed for remote management. That being said, a lot of the numbers here seemed to be miss reported. This seems like a combination of genuine issue and fear pandering.

>Twice, Dehghantanha has seen hackers break into a farm system and threaten to kill livestock — chickens in one case, cattle in another. And in about a third of the investigations his team as conducted over the past year, he has found evidence that state-sponsored hackers from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have figured out how to quietly gain access to a control system inside a farm.

...

>For example, a hacker could gain control of a thermostat and threaten to turn up the heat and kill an entire flock of chickens.

More info needed. Are they actually hacking into the HVAC and bricking it, or is a website getting popped and then a scary message is displayed? Or both? These are always separate systems with separate creds. Maybe this is the way farmers realize you don't use the same password for your s3 bucket and "prod" chicken barn thermostat.

Speculation warning, since no devices were directly referenced...

These setups use PLCs to control water circulation, ventilation actuators, augers, and the like. I've even seen Honey Bee feeding set up with PLC interfaces just because they're common and easy.

But if they're on the internet with a dashboard, they are likely the "soft belly" as we've seen in lots of industrial ransomware incidents.

I've worked in similar ( not the same sector ) automation control environments where the programmers involved live in time-crunch "copy-pasta, change the labels" environments and security is relegated to network models.

How many control systems have been impacted by scope creep and are now on the network when they weren't initially? How many of those are on the internet because someone wanted access from their iPad?

I'm fairly bothered that the only hope I have in some of the equipment I've worked on is that if it is accessible from the internet one day, it has far too many indistinguishable peers to be a "particular" target and it would take a lot of research to determine any value.

I've a neighbor who is a chicken farmer. The thermostat can be controlled remotely, so I suppose it's possible to hack it.

Can cryptocurrency just hurry up and die off already?

I can’t think of any technological development that has been more of a net negative for society than cryptocurrency.

Nuclear weapons? Leaded petrol?

We haven’t had World War III since nuclear weapons were invented. I’d consider that a net positive.

Leaded petrol enabled transportation on a grand scale until it was discovered to be harmful and replaced with unleaded. Again, cryptocurrencies are so much worse.

> We haven’t had World War III since nuclear weapons were invented. I’d consider that a net positive.

Not to take away from your point about crypto (which I agree with) but I wouldn't call that a positive. WW3 is near certain to happen some day. It's only been 80 years and we've already had multiple extremely close calls that we escaped by pure luck. 80 years is not a very long time when it comes to weapon history. How long was the sword and spear in use?

We've avoided an atomic holocaust in spite of nuclear stockpiles, not because of them.

I disagree, mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War relatively cold for decades of hostilities between two superpowers.

EDIT:

Also, don’t underestimate how many people (Soldiers and civilians alike) would have been killed in an amphibious assault on Japan itself by the allied forces. This was the reasoning behind using atomic weapons at the end of World War II in the first place.

I am quite certain that nuclear weapons have saved lives overall.

If not for nuclear weapons, WW3 almost certainly would have already occurred during the 20th century, plausibly starting during the Berlin Blockade in the immediate aftermath of WW2. And if not then when wounds were still healing, then a few years later.

Advances in weapon delivery have made WW3 less likely to start now than ever before. With very precise guidance, the feasibility of ensuring the utter destruction of leadership has improved dramatically. The idea is to make WW3 the least rational option for anybody who might start it. Even if somebody goes insane and wants to die in a fireball, it is unlikely that they would be able to convince everybody else in the kill-chain to go along with that decision. A "General Ripper" scenario in which only a few nukes fly at first is unlikely to escalate into a full blown war, because even in that scenario a full committed nuclear exchange would still be irrational for both sides. Furthermore, ballistic missile submarines make it infeasible to "win" a short nuclear war with a decapitating strike. The effect of all of these systems taken together is a strong incentive to deescalate even if a limited nuclear exchange were to occur.

> We've avoided an atomic holocaust in spite of nuclear stockpiles, not because of them.

If not for nuclear weapons, an "atomic holocaust" would never have been on the table, so that's basically a tautological statement. What we actually avoided with nuclear weapons was a WW3 fought with chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The supposed ineffectiveness of chemical weapons is a modern myth; during the cold war both sides fully expected and prepared for the extensive use of chemical weapons. Such disasters were only narrowly averted during WW2; Hitler refused to use nerve gasses perhaps for personal reasons, and because he feared the allied bombers operating with near impunity over Germany would be able to respond in kind (the allies did not then have nerve gas, but Hitler didn't know that.) And if Churchill had his way, Germany would have been rendered uninhabitable for generations using anthrax bombs; thankfully his staff managed to talk him out of it. You might think that these are examples of chemical and biological weapons providing sufficient deterrence on their own, but they weren't sufficient deterrence to stop the war generally, and neither chemical nor biological weapons could be as effective at killing leadership in bunkers as nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have proven to be much more effective at deterrence.

> The supposed ineffectiveness of chemical weapons is a modern myth; during the cold war both sides fully expected and prepared for the extensive use of chemical weapons.

I thought it was the other way around?

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

1. Leaded Petrol was known to be harmful for a long time. In fact, some TEL Additives were very pointedly marketed as 'Ethyl' and did their best to leave the 'Lead' part out.

2. Ethanol was known to have Anti-knock properties at the time. The only advantage of TEL was that it helped the life of the valvetrain... oh and it was patentable.

The valve thing is urban legend, insofar as there's no evidence that TEL mitigating valve seat damage was a known phenomena before the 1960s. So mitigating valve seat recession was not the motivation of TEL when TEL was adopted and only became a motivation for keeping TEL decades later when the effect was discovered.

Leaded petrol was known to be harmful by the very person who drove the manufacturing process. People working with the stuff were known to not last.

The smartphone

Democracy-destroying social media networks and weapons of mass dumbing down like TikTok are much more harmful to the world than cryptocurrencies.

As much as I agree with the first half of your statement, the climate impacts of crypto far outstrip the genocide-inducing effects of social media.

How many deaths would you attribute to cryptocurrency?

Dollar hegemony's death toll is in the millions.

Let’s turn it around this way…what good has cryptocurrency done?

Enables storage and transaction of value without indirectly funding the war machine

Cryptocurrency directly funds criminal organizations and rogue nations like North Korea.

Dollars do that to a much larger extent

that photo of the chicken barn is terrifying

Lots of beings trapped in four walls with artificial light all day, just like the office... oh.

People are being murdered in offices by the billion?

No, in many cases it's a much slower agonizing death. But you might get a gold watch at the end!

That's what they told those chicken too

You'll have to look up agonizing, I bet going through a machine with the sounds of your companions dying all around you is a lot more agonizing than choosing an unhappy life and living with those consequences

I would agree, but I've seen cattle being offloaded into an abattoir. A few trucks in a parking lot, one unloading into a corral, with a bridge/ramp headed into the building.

I've seen startled cattle, and I've seen frightened cattle. None of these were. Yet inside, the sound of dying cattle could be heard, with a "Bam!" from the gun used to euthanize by nail-to-the-brain, and a "thud' of the cattle falling afterwards.

I presumed, at the time, that the lack of concern was due to a lack of panicked sounds. The cattle simply died instantly, without exhibiting any pain response, or noise, first.

So no.. at least for cattle, it seems to be without the experience you describe.

I bet if we had cow psychologists they might diagnose them with shock, living near pig farms my experience is a lot different. The stress of transportation, the smell of dead animals, these are so unnatural and without any possible escape what would you do?

Murder is a bit hyperbolic isn’t it?

These animals have been raised solely with the purpose of being eaten. They would have never come in to existence otherwise, and their death is happening to feed people.

Your reasoning here is wrong I don't even know where to start... The fact that Agent A brings into existence Agent B gives them the right to dispose of Agent B in any way they want? When does that ever make sense?

Would you prefer these domestic animals just get set free in the wild to be eaten by predators, starve to death, or die of preventable diseases? They have already been born, they can feed people, and they will most likely live a much less humane life in the wild.

Sure, hypothetically some of them could become pets, but that would be a tiny minority of them.

This is just one of the reasons why people here in the UK are so opposed to allowing imports of cheap US meat - US and Canadian animal welfare standards are absolutely disgusting.

EDIT: missed out the word "Canadian" by mistake.

Singer’s Animal Liberation in the 70s had an impact on most of the world whereas in the US animal welfare got worse as farm sizes continued to increase and farms industrialized.

I'm glad to see this book mentioned. It's a good read. Not dogmatic. It explores several angles from which to think about the welfare of animals in the custody of humans.

It was a picture of a Canadian farm.

Not that you're wrong about US factory farming, but this article (and the photos) are only concerned with Canada. It's, unfortunately, not just a US problem.

why, its canada, outside could be cold and snowy and while it seem crowded, we cannot tell for sure

yes i read the articles that said, when chicken are put in very tight place or in areas where they are too crowded, i that they can start to behave aggressive towards each other

that being said, how can we tell if this is too crowded for chickens?

I don't think that they even go outside...

> that being said, how can we tell if this is too crowded for chickens?

lmao this is on the same level as when we used to do surgery on newborn/babies without anaesthetics because "they can't feel pain"

We grow them so fast their organs can't even follow, we let them live for 4 weeks before slaughter when healthy ones could live 5-10 years, we cut their beak so they can't hurt eachother in stress induced fights

How can you look at a picture of a dark barn, with something like 10+ chicken per sq meter, bathing in their own shit and piss for the bulk of their miserable existence, and ask "how can we tell if this is too crowded for chickens"

> outside could be cold and snowy

They most likely will never see outside, the extreme vast majority don't

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx4rDvYHrZM

https://www.humanesociety.org/news/super-size-problem-broile...

I can tell you from personal experience working in these barns that it really is that crowded, and it isn't pleasant in there for either chickens or humans.

That's nothing.

Here's the latest, world's most advanced disease incubator. Courtesy of China of course. [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-2...

Doesn't seem any worse than "battery cages" for chickens. Not that either setup is good for the animals.

What's the solution though? Either people need to eat less meat (and pay more for it) or the global human population needs to stabilize or even decrease a little. Neither option seems popular, so technology fills the need.

The developed world is really doing its bit here. We have stopped breeding humans at a sustainable rate and are looking at falling populations in the near future as the boomers age-out

Or stop eating meat altogether. Problem of unsustainable and cruel meat production solved.

Those pig barns look about the same as the ones in Iowa. Only difference is one is in a high rise.

>Workers will be required to go through multiple rounds of disinfection and testing before being given clearance to enter, and won’t be able to leave the site until their next break – reportedly once a week.

I can't imagine living and working for weeks at a time in an environment like that,it sounds awfully dystopian. Imagine a cyberpunk future where the lower casts are permanent sequestered from society because they've been quarantined.

They can leave at any time. It's just that their social credit score will go to 0.

There is a movie you may want to watch.

"Andromeda Strain", directed by Robert Wise, 1971.

The sequence where the specialists are "sterilized" before entering the most secure levels of the lab are best.

Robot voice: "Please enter the chamber and be sterilized."

Dr Leavitt (played by Kate Reid): "I'd rather be decontaminated."

I can't see why. Is not much different that seen a photo of an astronaut in a space ship. Winter in Canada is harsh. Outside there is dark and chilling, not much food or water and everything outside would kill this animals in one hour or two. Less than 24 hours for sure.

Is totally, 120% reasonable, to keep the animals inside at this time. Inside there is light, warm, safety from predators, food, water, healthcare and other chicken to fight, annoy, cluck or chat with, that is very nice when you are a gregarious species as chicken are.

And at the end of their life they will be insta-killed

But lets don't allow reality to ruin a juicy horror tale. Free Willys, so they can die frozen, or be hunted by predators while trying to fly, and feel how each single bone in their chest is fractured one by one, and then eaten alive.

Looking at the photo I wonder if those animals will be worse off if these “farmers” aren’t willing to pay…

Sad for the animals. But what do people reading the article think is going to happen to the animals anyway? They are going to get killed so you can eat them. Have you seen how they kill chickens? Hang them by their feet and slit their throats. Nice. All because YOU demand it every time you buy that pack of chicken breasts for your unimaginative "lean protein hurr durr" meal of chicken and broccoli. Maybe stop eating meat and the poor things wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.

Agreed. This isn't really a threat from the perspective of the animals. (Or, well, it is, but the magnitude of the loss isn't very high. Maybe it's like a death row inmate dying of covid instead of lethal injection scheduled for a month in the future?) The animals are going to die regardless. This is a ransomware threat to the profit-making which requires the animals to die in the "right" manner.

Granted, the article DOES NOT discuss this issue as the title (and your comment) suggests. The article talks about how ransomware is a sneaky threat to Canadian national food security. I'd not considered ransomware and food security too closely intertwined, so that's nice I guess. If all of the livestock in the country dies, there's probably not enough rice, beans, and potatoes for everyone .

Because there's a difference between millions of animals being murdered for no reason and then wasted vs millions of animals being slaughtered for food. For one, nobody is going to eat those animals because many of them were not ready or there is simply too much supply for the demand at that time.

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