Kristin Demoranville

And IT, which also could be connected to OT depending on your access level control where you are. Cameras. There should have been cameras. There wasn't.

I mean, the only reason they found out is because they did some testing on the other end from quality and they realized, oh, whoops, we have, you know, peanuts in our cookie that we shouldn't have that go out to this major retailer, which they lost that retailer because of that incident. They lost it. They lost face. It was a mess. It was a total brand incident, total nightmare.

That to me is something that cybersecurity and OT should have been involved in. It shouldn't have happened in the first place because they should have set up parameters to get around that, you know, not to ever happen. And then on top of it, we should have had that conversation. We should have been part of that conversation.

That bothers me a lot that we don't think that far because that's a resilience piece. Because people are like, oh, well, that's not an adversary. That's not a cyber attack. It's an insider threat. To me, describing this incident to a food defense professional, they literally said that's terrorism. They would class that as terrorism on their report.

And I went, wow, so that's like domestic terrorism? They're like, yeah. And I'm like, whoa. So now we have a whole other level of things I didn't understand at that time. And now looking back on it and thinking about the system as a whole, yeah, we have a stake in this. We have responsibility. Access control is our problem.

And I've had to define what a cyber physical system is multiple times recently. I thought it was self-explanatory. I'm not picking on people who don't know, but I literally have had four people in the last two weeks ask me exactly what that is. And I've been on air when it's happened. And I'm like, well, it's something that can get on the internet.

Like, I guess that's how the best way I would describe it to you. It's something that could be both physical and cyber related. So push a button, pull a lever, but you can also sit on your couch and push a button on your phone. And people are like, oh, cyber physical. Wouldn't that just be IOT? I'm like, not necessarily. So it's a...

We've got some we've got some branding term issues we need to deal with in order to make this more mainstream, even though it is mainstream because we all eat and we all work and around this a lot. And I don't I don't think it's us. I don't know. I don't know what it is.

But we need kind of a rebrand in the OT side to be able to start communicating what we need in order to serve the companies and the people that we do. Because we can sit in a room all day long and geek out and get excited. We do every time we're at a conference together. Everybody's like, woo!

I will say that OTICS conferences are my favorite, not because I'm biased because I'm in the niche, but we have a different conversation. It's personal. It's almost intimate because we understand the human factor here differently. And we look at it like that in a very severe way. And like you said, it's not sexy all the time. We have to wear more protective gear.

It makes us look crazy all the time. I mean, you have hard hats behind you. I mean, I have had to wear multiple hairnets and like basically a shield and you have to like put yourself into a zip up like white suit and booties. Like it is not, you are not attractive. You look like a steak puff marshmallow. What went wrong? But I still love it.

Like, I can't imagine not working in this industry, right? Like, I can't imagine not being here. And the fact that I get to sit on podcasts like this and talk to people like you, it's just so much fun. I have such a great time here. Hey, listeners, we'll take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. Just a reminder to check out our website for all things Bites and Bites.

Blog posts, additional content, and of course, our merch shop. If you're enjoying the show, hit that subscribe button to never miss an episode. I appreciate all of you who share the podcast with your network. It really does help the show grow and bring more great content to you. We'll be back in a few minutes with more of my conversation with Erin.

If you go on a hospital, forget the hospital.

It's a return on investment, right? You've got to value your property, if you will, or your IP or whatever you want to call it. If you don't, then running into this constant recovery mode that we're stuck in. On repeat, we are on repeat in recovery mode. We need to get out of recovery mode and start focusing on being resilient because it's going to happen.

happen and there are cost-effective ways to get around it but again it's not the sexy stuff it's the people stuff right and nobody wants to talk about people because we're hard and maybe that's part of the reason why food and ag and even water kind of got left to the side is because people are hard and maybe that's part of it also the people who came to the table first were oil and gas sure i mean they have a stronger lobby but most of the countries that are out there also have their critical infrastructure and food and ag was put on there's the first bit so i don't

And we have so many examples. And I know I don't want to be heavy like nation state poo-poo here, but here we are. We already have examples of how this is happening. Destabilize a country. They will do that through electricity and food. Because they want you to freeze to death in the winter and they want you to starve. It's basic warfare, right? That scares me. We already have examples.

Ukraine is a great one. Not a great one for a good reason, but it's a great example of this for happening. And it's so frustrating to me that we still haven't realized this. I have a good friend of mine who is a agricultural futurist. He's a strategist. He does focus on cybersecurity as well. And he asked me, deadpan one day, have I ever starved? Or how was the longest I went without food?

I'm like, I don't know, 48 hours, maybe because of a flight situation or something like that. And he goes, you know, he's like, I tried an experiment for 10 days. And he's like, I didn't make it that far. He goes, it made me realize how many hours or days would it take you to commit a crime? You had to feed your family and there was no food. Yeah.

And I thought, I don't know, probably some people will make a couple hours. He goes, if he said the average is something like eight hours. And I was like, that's chaos. That's chaos in the street, literally. And everybody would feel it the same way. I can't imagine specifically the United States being in that type of chaos. The amount of guns we have in this country, for example.