FBI warns agriculture sector on cyber threats
FBI's Agriculture Threats Symposium in Nebraska highlighted ransomware, foreign malware, IP theft, and bioterrorism risks facing U.S. farming and food infrastructure.
Sourcefbi.gov — open the original
What to check
- Applies to
- Whether this concerns you is not assessed; the names the report mentions are listed below.
The FBI's Omaha Field Office and Nebraska Farm Bureau hosted the second annual Agriculture Threats Symposium, bringing together over 400 farmers, cybersecurity experts, and policymakers to discuss growing cyber and national security risks to U.S. agriculture. Officials outlined four major threat categories tracked by the Bureau: ransomware attacks, malware from foreign adversaries, theft of data and intellectual property, and bioterrorism. The event underscored how precision farming technology—GPS systems, automated equipment, and cloud-connected machinery—has expanded the attack surface for an industry increasingly treated as critical infrastructure alongside water, power, and transportation.
Specific incidents cited include a 2021 ransomware attack attributed to Russia that shut down a major meatpacking plant, six grain cooperatives in the Midwest forced to shut down after cyberattacks last year, and a farm that suffered $9 million in damages. The FBI also referenced ongoing economic espionage by Chinese nationals posing as tourists or researchers to steal rice and corn seed intellectual property. Officials connected these threats to the broader Volt Typhoon campaign, in which Chinese state actors were found to have pre-positioned access within multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, reinforcing DHS assessments that adversaries view infrastructure targeting as a way to induce cascading disruption.
The symposium's primary message centered on basic cyber hygiene—multi-factor authentication and data backups—and building information-sharing partnerships between the FBI and the largely privately-controlled agriculture sector. No specific new technical indicators, malware samples, or CVEs were disclosed; the piece is an awareness and outreach report rather than a technical advisory.
Mentioned in this report
Source reporting: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/agriculture-threats-symposium-in-nebraska-highlights-safety-measures-to-protect-nations-critical-food-infrastructure
Free public brief. Slack alerts on the vendors you run come with the paid plans, and a new account gets three days of them, no card.
What this brief leaves out
This page is the free tier: the write-up, the severity, the names. In the app the same report carries live profiles of the actors and campaigns it names. The paid plans add the security research and news reporting the free tier leaves out.
It sits in a corpus of 16,572 reports from 147 sources, 724 of them written in the last seven days, and it grows through the day.
A new account starts with three days of all of it, no card, then keeps the government and CERT reporting free. Slack alerts are a paid-plan feature: name the vendors you run and Slack hears about the reports that touch them, not the rest of the week's. Nothing is charged unless you subscribe.
Create a free account What it costs