by Jake Edmiston, Yahoo News:
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.
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In other cases, it’s more sophisticated. Twice, Dehghantanha has seen hackers break into a farm system and threaten to kill livestock — chickens in one case, cattle in another. And in about a third of the investigations his team as conducted over the past year, he has found evidence that state-sponsored hackers from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have figured out how to quietly gain access to a control system inside a farm.
“That’s a lot,” he said.
Dehghantanha runs the Cyber Science Lab at the University of Guelph, about 100 kilometres west of Toronto in one of Ontario’s most important farming hubs. The lab has a group of specialists who make house calls to people and businesses who fall victim to cybercrimes. So over the years, Dehghantanha has visited banks, defence contractors and hospitals, and by virtue of working in a place like Guelph, he’s been called to farms as well. First, it was just farmer friends calling him in a crisis. But over the past four years, the calls have ballooned. Last year, he received at least 50 calls from the food industry. And in that time, he has realized that the domestic food production system may actually be one of the most glaring cracks in Canada’s national defences.
“They’ve just become so common. Every week, I would say, we are getting contacted by farmers or food companies,” he said. “It’s one of the soft bellies of our critical infrastructure.”
The idea of criminals or state-sponsored hackers breaking into systems and disrupting critical infrastructure, such as transportation or health care or food production, has become alarmingly plausible in recent years, particularly in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last summer, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) — Ottawa’s signals intelligence agency — warned that Russia-backed hackers are “exploring options for potential counterattacks” on critical infrastructure in Canada and other NATO allies that have supported Ukraine. And last month, Alia Tayyeb, deputy chief of signals intelligence at CSE, told a House of Commons committee that the severity of cybercrimes against Canada’s critical infrastructure is “growing exponentially.”
