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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There is purpose actually, because I want to have a conversation more about normal, normal, I say in quotations, practices in cybersecurity, but also let's swing in at how it relates to food and both of them have industrial backgrounds. So it works out just for the audience understanding.
Andrew, in the UK side, based on your extensive experience in industrial cybersecurity, AKA the airports and beyond, What are the key lessons that the food industry can learn to improve their cybersecurity posture, in your opinion? Oh, gosh.
Absolutely. And I think this is why cybersecurity has to be included in food safety culture, because the more you tie it to the safety of the food, the more people will care about it and the more they'll, you know, be careful, I guess is what I'll say.
I'm glad you said that because that's very true, especially even just in straight up manufacturing. It's availability that's the king, if you will. That's so important. And I was thinking about since we were both at RSA recently, I was thinking about the marketing information I saw walking around. I don't know if you happen to notice some of it as well. I'm sure you couldn't not actually.
But there was one particular vendor who said something like, we eliminate all operational technology risks. And I was like, so you take the people out? Like, that was my immediate response in my head. And it was funny because I ran into another host of another podcast who interviewed me on the floor and I said it to him and he was like, wait, what?
And I was like, yeah, you got to take people away from it. If you keep people in there, you can't eliminate all risks. There's no way. And you just said that. It's crazy to think that people think that you can do the X, Y, Z, da, da, da. But if you don't train your staff or they don't understand why it's important and where they should care, that leads to more problems. And it's so frustrating.
Pipeline is a great example, but I was thinking of JBS. That also showed that you have to have important disaster recovery. This is continuity planning. You can't retract beef once it's hit the trailer. There's no food or pasture necessarily for them to go back to the farm. And it might have been struck pretty far depending on where they were coming from.
Now you get stressed out meat that's defecating on itself. Yeah. And there's all these other additional food safety issues that are happening because of it. That was such a devastating situation that has such long-term effects. And God knows the payouts were rough. They were paying so much, not only for the ransom, but the cleanup, if you will.
And they don't, this is the problem is, oh, it's not going to happen to us. But if it does, we'll be fine. How can you assure, how is that assured? Like, I don't know. That's frustrating.
I completely agree. Andrew from the U.S., do you want to weigh in since you're on the front lines of agrotech?
That's a really graphic description. Wow. I think the thing that's really interesting about this is the it's such a distinctive difference between the enterprise side and the industrial farm, a whole bit manufacturing that people keep trying to twist it to be like enterprise.
So when they talk about it in groups, like especially, and I'm sure you've run into this too, where you're trying to explain what you've dealt with in your career and what you've seen on the industrial side to someone who's only been in enterprise, they kind of look at you funny, like, but why would you do it that way?
And my response back is a risk in your environment isn't necessarily a risk in my environment and vice versa. It's the people that are always going to be the biggest risk, full stop. Whether it's their safety or they're doing something or didn't mean to do something or something happened. Most of the time, it's the people that are causing the problem. I would say probably 90% of the time.
Technology doesn't wake up one day and decide to give itself a virus. You know what I mean? That's not something that it does. If it starts doing that, then we're done. We've got bigger problems. The days of it's become sentient, it's here. No, not yet.
What I think is frustrating from a cybersecurity point of view is I feel like I have to evangelize so much into the cybersecurity world to let them know that this is a problem, that agriculture and the food industry need help. And not because it needs help, but because it's the right thing to do too, because we all eat, you know, we need to care.
And the fact that it wasn't added to the 16 critical infrastructures or 15 at the time until 2020 completely pisses me off. Like- We've been eating and harvesting and doing this for the dawn of time. And here we are not realizing that we need to care about it because oil and gas go first. Automotive goes first. You know, water is not even really a consideration at times.
We have to rope that into the food industry because it's so prevalent in not only the production of food, but creating food. And I'm actually at a place where I'm simmeringly angry at all times about it now. We need to do something. Like we need to keep talking about it. All I do is evangelize. Like, hi, we need to care about cybersecurity and food. The food teams get it.
The food scientists, the quality people, the protection people, they understand. The defense teams definitely get it because we can help them fight food fraud and obviously all the drug issues that are happening in the food industry. But it's just like, why aren't cybersecurity people click? Where's the light bulb moment? Why aren't they understanding this? Is it because it's too hard?
Because it's too, I don't know, food is a very emotional thing, you know, because we have that connection to it. I just don't understand. That's where I get a little annoyed. And this is just me sharing a general annoyance.
Yeah, I know enough about the UK side in terms of the food industry and the agriculture side to know that it's a very regulation driven. There's almost like a police for everything, which is I don't think it's really a bad thing because it's keeping you honest. Right. But to the point where the farming, let's be real. And I think
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