Cybersecurity in Agriculture

Sophisticated attackers, FBI investigations, and how to build your own test bench for tractors. 🚜 🐮 💻 😈

When I first got into car hacking, I wasn’t really thinking about tractors or other farm equipment (you know, the stuff that helps produce our food). But the situation is pretty serious: most of the equipment is cheap and outdated, the owners don’t really know much about the risks, and the scale of the attacks is basically on a nation-state level.

You don’t need to hunt for the newest and coolest connected supercar to show off your skills. You can make a difference right now by helping protect the farmer nearby.

Since this is a broad topic, I'll split the post into two parts:

🚜 Public Use Cases - to illustrate the scale of the problem

🚜 Technical Papers - and how to move forward

So, Public Use Cases:

🌽 [2024] "Cybercriminals Hijack a Robotic Milking System, Causing Cattle to Die": https://www.thebullvine.com/news/cybercriminals-hijack-milking-robots-swiss-farmers-data-held-ransom/

🌽 [2024] "Cyber Defense for Agricultural Control Systems" presentation by Ray Baeza:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG6wJVDBt9w

🌽 [2020] FBI operation "Purple Maze" from VanityFair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/01/how-chinese-immigrant-became-pawn-in-us-technological-cold-war-with-beijing

Now, Technical Papers that will help you dig deeper:

🌾 Communication Layer Security in Smart Farming: A Survey on Wireless Technologies https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.06013

🌾 STRIDE-based Cyber Security Threat Modelling for IoT-enabled Precision Agriculture Systems

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09493

🌾 Towards a Cybersecurity Testbed for Agricultural Vehicles and Environments

https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05866

Post Credits: Denis Laskov on LinkedIn