According to the ICS-CERT (Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team) fiscal year 2015 final incident response statistics, the food and agriculture segment reported only two cyberattacks last year. Still, food and beverage processors should not rest easy. Though the probability of a cyberattack may be small, its cost can be high.
Fifteen years ago, industrial espionage could be accomplished via phone calls and “human engineering.” (See “Corporate Spies: The Pizza Plot” by Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry.1) Today, corporate espionage often involves computer system break-ins that can result in the loss of intellectual property such as recipes, vital brand information, customer data, inventory and production records, supplier data—and the list goes on. At the industrial controls level, a cyberattack could shut down your production, destroy processing equipment, hurt product quality or even adversely affect food safety. The question is: While your plant may recover from a break-in, will your brand survive?