Even small farmers usually are not resistant to cyberattacks. Important Bircher, a farmer in Hagendorn, Switzerland, between Zurich and Lucerne, just lately skilled an assault on his laptop programs, which have been additionally linked the dairy farmer’s milking robots, the Luzerner Zeitung first reported. Finally, one among Bircher’s cows died on account of the assault.
Bircher initially suspected an outage as a result of he was now not receiving milking information for his cows. The farmer was then alerted by the his milking system producer that he had been hacked. The assault included a ransomware part that locked up Bircher’s information, with the attackers demanding $10,000 to decrypt it.
Lacking important information, rescue try comes too late
Bircher initially thought-about whether or not he ought to conform to the attacker’s ransomware calls for. Not receiving information on the quantity of milk produced was not an emergency state of affairs for the farmer, whose dairy farm sits on the northern fringe of Lake Zug. As well as, the milking robots may function with out a pc or community connection within the occasion of an outage in order that the animals can proceed to be milked.
