Is hacking the next struggle for US agriculture?

Agriculture - down to the smallest businesses and farms - needs to think about its vulnerabilities. What information is protected by a flimsy password or a faulty old program? — AFP

In June, global meatpacking giant JBS USA said it paid US$11mil (RM45mil) to hackers to stop a ransomware attack that occurred the month prior. That raised some alarms, of course – the last thing the meat industry needs is more disruption, as every livestock producers knows.

But JBS being the target of that kind of attack is not really all that surprising, on the surface. It's a huge company. And huge companies tend to be easy targets. Everyone knows they exist, where they operate, why they operate. Their importance to the food chain, and thus the stability of the U.S., and in the JBS case, Australia, is pretty obvious. They were not the first nor last big company to be targeted by hackers.