Kristin Demoranville
speaker
976 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Kristin Demoranville’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is such a big question and I don't have the right answer. So I'm just going to kind of give you some train of thought on it.
Agriculture and the food industry as a whole wasn't added to the critical infrastructure number for CISA or Homeland Security until 2020. That wasn't that long ago. You know, that is disturbing, first of all. I think it's a kind of a twofold issue where people think that the food industry doesn't have any money, which is hysterical because, I mean, Mars just bought part of Kellogg's today. Right.
As of today. And that was a $300 million deal, I believe. Don't quote me. Sure. But it was something ridiculous. So tell me again, there's no money in the food industry. Right. Also, I believe the largest payout for ransomware to date that we're aware of, and I say that loosely because we don't know at all, was the food industry. Right. So there's money. So I don't buy that really very well.
I think the actual reason is because nobody's got a handle on what the actual supply chain for food looks like. Right. And that was shown very clearly when the ransomware for JBS hit the meat company. Right. Because it was awful and still is.
I was actually just speaking to some people from the cattle industry last week, and they were expressing their frustration of just how difficult it is to manage their supply chain. So what if a supplier gets hit like JBS? How do the grocers purchase any meat? They can't purchase it from them. So where do they go? Is there a backup plan?
You know, there's all these questions that I went even further and said, what happens with JBS? Because the cattle couldn't get slaughtered in time. So then you've got cattle that's standing in trailers or holding pens. You can't retract them to the farm because they don't have feed or space for them probably by then because they've already rotated. There's all these.
So who does the burden fall onto? The rancher? Oh, God, I hope not, you know? Right. Does it fall on the distributor? They don't have overflow pens necessarily. Nobody's ever tested their backup incident response plans. There's no disaster recovery. There's no BCP because people just think, oh, well, you know, it's like business as usual.
We're just going to lean on people around us in the community. But the community has shrunk because... We're losing agriculture jobs every day because people are moving to cities. It's not as popular anymore. It's trying to get a little more trendy.
I'll be honest around like regenerative agriculture, because you can be a total nerd and geek and still farm because now you can bring your cyber truck out to move your chicken house. Which looks sexy, right? Like not that it's not sexy, but it's just the concept of it is sexy. You could use, you know, hybrid cars or plugins to do that work. So that kind of is attractive, obviously.
I've been kind of joking around. It's like cyber farming, you know, in a way. Yeah. I'm don't quote me on that. Cause if somebody brands that, I'll be like, well, but those kinds of things, people just don't have a good handle on the supply chain at all because it is huge.
And instead of actually, and I say this all the time and I ripped this off a friend of mine, that's an OT in the UK, but we literally keep trying to boil the ocean, find that silver bullet moment when we just need to sit down and make a cup of tea.
And if we start focusing on the smaller aspects, like, you know, people process, because honestly it's probably the easier and less expensive to deal with. And then move to, okay, we've got these technology that are in these environments. What are we doing with them? There are companies out there turning tractors into autonomous vehicles via like a little kit. That's O-T-I-C-S.
Like, hello, does the industry know that? Did you know that, listener? Did you know that? Like, that's stuff when I hear that, I'm like, oh my God, did anybody talk to the security teams around these? Like, the farmer doesn't have a security team. Mm-mm. The farmer doesn't have time for that. They are just happy if they break even and make some profit at the end of the year.
That's what they want to do. Keep their families fed, the lights on, their cattle fed. That's it, right? It doesn't have to be more than that. But here we are as security professionals who have been in the industry long enough, both of us, and we know just how bad it's going to get because nobody's been dealing with this. So my worry, and I know I'm jumping your question, Seth. Okay.
Everybody get it. What my worry is over the next three to seven years, roughly, is that we're going to have such a major foodborne illness issue out of the food industry because of some cyber attack that hit, whether it's nation state, bad actor, disruptor, brand disruptions, whatever, that we're going to be so rattled that we're not going to know what to do.
And we're going to do the wrong things. We're going to put a Band-Aid that needs to be a stitches situation. And it's just going to make the supply chain even worse. And that's my concern. And I've talked to a few food safety experts who've asked me on air, literally, hey, how many bodies need to be on the floor before somebody does something? And my response back was probably a lot.
And I hate to say that out loud. And the person who asked me that actually lost a child to E. coli poisoning. So it was this really personal moment of, I'm sorry to say, I just think we're not smart enough to deal with it ahead of time. Because people don't like being proactive. They just want to be reactive. And that's frustrating.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Bites and Bites podcast in collaboration with Protect It All podcast. Your support means the world to me. I have some very exciting news. I've been nominated for the Women in Podcasting Awards in the technology category. Yeah. Please vote for the show.
Your vote would be a huge help in gaining visibility and raising more awareness for cybersecurity and food and agriculture. Voting is open now from August 1st till October 1st and the link can be found in the show notes. Thank you in advance. I appreciate you taking the time and I couldn't be more thrilled that the show has been nominated. Now back to my conversation with Aaron.
And I'm about to use some buzzy terms, so everybody just brace. But we need to move away from being in recovery mode all the time to being resilient, especially in the food industry. And that's what I constantly go in and talk about. You're going to get hit with an attack. I don't want to hear that you're not because you are. Are you prepared? And the response back is, I don't know.
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