Tips for Making Your Agribusiness Cyber Secure

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

On yesterday’s program, Jen Pino-Gallagher is the Director of Food and Agribusiness Practice at M3 Insurance joined us to talk about cyber-security calling farmers names like “low-hanging fruit.” Hard to hear, but apparently true as she says that cyber-attack claims have jumped in the past six weeks among agribusinesses. She told us about insurance options, but what are some other ways that you can raise that drawbridge?

“Whether you have an individual farm or you have a large agribusiness, backing up your information is very important. Training your employees on how to identify these malicious emails, the fake emails, the phishing emails. I would say even at the family level, talk to your kids about cyber protection. I found a really interesting survey that was done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Researchers wanted to figure out what do kids know about passwords. And the percentages of the respondents said that they used the same password for everything, that increased by age. So the younger kids, said about 58% of the respondents said they use the same password for everything. By the time they got to high school age, 87% said they use the same password for every platform.”

Darn kids, right? There’s your weekly assignment, update your passwords. Jen Pino-Gallagher, Director of Food and Agribusiness Practice at M3 Insurance.