Articles Tagged with ''cybersecurity''

On November 10, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the National Security Memorandum-16 (NSM-16), which aims to strengthen the security and resilience of the U.S. food supply and agricultural systems. NSM-16 focuses on threats such as climate change, supply chain disruption, cyberattacks, worker safety and workplace development, and other topics.

Cyber is the backbone for food and agriculture defense. Adversaries have the means, opportunity, and motivation to break the cyber backbone at will. If or when adversaries carry out an attack of large magnitude, the result could be a massive compromise of food safety, food defenses, and food security. To avoid that dark scenario, agriculture and food companies must properly prepare for a different kind of assault. The place to start is with their own cyber defense systems.

In this episode of Food Safety Matters, we interviewed professionals from the industry, regulatory, and nonprofit sectors, live from the show floor of the Food Safety Summit, which took place on May 9–12 in Rosemont, Illinois. We discussed food safety management systems, the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, recall modernization, supply chain disruptions, food fraud, and humanizing food safety through effective messaging.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted the food supply. This article seeks to explain the transcendent lessons of this national emergency, with the hope that being aware of them will help national decision-makers better prepare for next time. Our food systems, like the larger supply chain, will be challenged in the future with new kinds of disruptions, making it essential that mistakes are not repeated and that proactive, correct solutions are discovered and preparations made now.

Food safety and food defense are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other, ultimately meaning that if one is compromised, so too is the other.

Brightsight, a cybersecurity evaluation laboratory network, has been acquired by SGS.