Safety Net: A flock of chickens, held for ransom — Growing cyberattacks on Canada’s food system threaten disaster

 

Ali Dehghantanha gets phone calls from farmers, sometimes in the middle of the night, looking for help with a cyberattack. In the last year, his squad of engineers and computer scientists has responded to dozens of reports of hacks inside farming and food production operations around southwestern Ontario. In some cases, it’s the garden variety hacking you’d expect, someone clicked a bad link in a sketchy email and now hackers want money to unlock a system or give back the farmer’s data.