As digitalization accelerates across industries, businesses find themselves increasingly vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. CFBN gathered a panel of cybersecurity experts to share critical insights into the risks and offered strategic recommendations to increase protection.  

Cyber Threats in the Food & Beverage Industry 

The food and agriculture industry is ranked sixth among the most cyber attacked industries on a global scale. Several factors make this sector especially vulnerable: 

Rod Kahl, Director of Cybersecurity at ACP CreativIT, compared the lack of skilled cybersecurity professionals to a ‘food desert’, noting how difficult it is for food companies to attract and retain the best cybersecurity talent. 

David Anderson, Principal and Cybersecurity Consultant at CLA, highlighted that food manufacturing is characterized by a relatively large share of the workforce with limited cybersecurity education and therefore more challenging to create a culture that, for example, values strong passwords or recognize phishing scams.

Cybersecurity incidents, panelists noted, are often a result of accumulated vulnerabilities. The consensus: breaches are inevitable. Every company is at risk, regardless of whether they acknowledge it.  

How to Protect your Business 

1.        Segregate Systems

Panelists emphasized implementing segregation between systems that work in the office and those that run in the plants. As Lori Anello, Chief Information Security Officer at Fifth Third Bank put it: “If operators don’t need email, leave them out of it, if office workers don’t need to be on the manufacturing floor, they don’t need access to it. Minimize cross-network traffic. Protecting the operational technology is a worthy investment, because that is what will protect your core business, i.e. manufacturing your products”. 

2.        Manage Third-Party Access 

Another important learning from the panelists was in dealing with your suppliers and third-party vendors: know who they are, what kind of data they use from you and how it will affect you when they’ll have to deal with a cybersecurity breach. As an illustration to this point, Karrieann Couture, Managing Director at AON shared an example of a company that granted access to third party vendors to their third party cafeteria vendor who created insufficient barriers which resulted in the hiring company’s entire operations impacted in a security breach when the vendor was hit.

3.        Create a Cybersecurity Culture 

Continuous employee training and creating a safe culture to report issues were suggestions and recommendations from the panelist to build a cyber secure culture. And that is much needed, because even with multifactor access, there is a risk of a security breach as we learned from Kahl. Bad actors have no limits, they tend to get personal, including reaching out to spouses according to examples from Couture. 

Key Steps for Securing Your Personal Cybersecurity 

Looking Ahead: AI, Robotics & Cybersecurity 

Ending with thinking about a future with increased AI and robotics, David Anderson laid out that businesses should build a roadmap for how to include AI, robotics and automation in their company and to make sure to add cybersecurity into that roadmap as a main component, not as an add on. Lori Anello added, “We need to protect AI from (hacker) AI”. That includes looking at ethical and safety issues related to AI, for example. 

Conclusion: Start Today!

The panel made it clear: the cyber threats facing the food and beverage industry are real, but so are the tools and strategies to mitigate them. The hands-on recommendations gave some reassurance that we can be better prepared for the future. On top of the personal “to-do-list”: get a password manager (and stop using Excel or the same password for simplicity).