Drs. Ali Dehghantanha, of the College of Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute, spoke to the Financial Post about the rise in cyberattacks on farms.  

Dehghantanha said the agri-food industry is “one of the soft bellies of [Canada’s] critical infrastructure” in terms of cybersecurity. 

The agri-food industry is “vulnerable because we haven’t thought carefully about the security of how” the cybersecurity systems are set up, Fraser added. 

A professor in the School of Computer Science and the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence, Dehghantanha researches on cybersecurity, cyber threat intelligence and digital forensics. 

Fraser is a professor in the Department of Geography, Environment & Geomatics at the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences. He helps lead the Food from Thought initiative and studies rural agricultural policy food security and how each is affected by climate change.