The threat of cyberattacks against American agriculture and food systems is growing, and Washington State University researchers are helping to lead a call for a national consortium of land-grant universities to study and combat the threat.
The recommendation from researchers across the country, published in Nature Food , follows three regionally coordinated workshops and follow-up sessions involving more than 150 stakeholders and participants. The co-authors — including four WSU researchers — urged the creation of a national, geographically distributed Agriculture Cybersecurity Consortium (ACC) based on strong partnerships with farms, cooperatives, agribusiness, cybersecurity businesses, government, NGOs and academia.
“With increased digitization of agricultural data and increased adoption of AI into daily workflows, it has become all the more important to provide cybersecurity guarantees in agriculture,” said Ananth Kalyanaraman, professor and director of the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as the director of the AgAID AI Institute for Transforming Workforce & Decision Support.
Monowar Hasan, an assistant professor in the EECS school whose Cyber-Physical Systems Security Research Lab focuses on cybersecurity, said that the workshops revealed that many people underestimate the cybersecurity risks in agriculture.
Source : wsu.edu