The Food and Beverage Industry Cybersecurity Challenges
EasySec Solutions
The Only Pragmatic and Preventive Security Solution for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
The food and beverage industry faces unique cybersecurity challenges due to its reliance on complex supply chains, IoT devices, and sensitive data. It is crucial for these companies to implement robust cybersecurity measures to protect public health by ensuring the quality of their products. In addition, the "Just-in-Time" nature of food supply chains makes them particularly vulnerable to financially motivated cyberattacks, like ransomware. As production and distribution are tightly coordinated to minimize waste and cost, any disruption caused by a cyberattack can have a ripple effect throughout the supply chain, leading to shortages and inevitable price increases.
Last February, the food giant Dole plc found itself the victim of a ransomware attack that temporarily forced them to shutter production plants in North America and suspend food shipments to grocery stores. Despite their claim to have acted quickly with the help of third-party cybersecurity experts, some of their products supply to outlets was suspended for over a week leading to a shortage of these products in many of them, to a very significant dry loss for them as well as damage to their brand image. Although the company did not provide information on the attack duration, its impact, and, the requested ransom, it can easily be assumed that this attack had major financial consequences. In addition, because similar incidents can potentially endanger public health, the FDA often decides to investigate it and check if there were any violations of food safety regulations related to the incident.
Ransomware is not the only digital scam that has hit the food and beverage sector. Last December, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other federal agencies warned that cybercriminals have stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of shipments from US food suppliers by placing fraudulent orders for milk products.
According to a recent IBM report, the ransomware deployment phase average duration moved from an average of 60 days in 2019 to just 4 days in 2021. It can be explained by the fact that an industrial operational network is particularly vulnerable and the existing cyber technologies used in OT are insufficient to protect them. This is particularly true for dangers emanating from inside their OT network against which they only use monitoring and traffic analysis tools. Most of the time, after detecting abnormal traffic, these tools raise an alert to the company security expert team. This team first has to analyze it, give it a priority, and find the correct way to block the current attack and close the eventual breaches in the systems. But they have to take these decisions under very strong pressure while the company is already under attack and its resources started to be damaged...?
领英推荐
To best be prepared, Food and Beverage Industry must absolutely move from a passive and reactive attitude to a preventive attitude by acquiring new Zero-Trust technologies especially designed for the OT constraints such as our ThinGuard 2.0 product, which is fully tailored for it.