The need for agricultural and food goods has dramatically expanded due to the rapid population growth. Agriculture's reliance on older technologies has rendered them outmoded and unable to meet demand. Agricultural goods' quantity and quality can be improved by integrating data-driven and sensor technology into the agriculture and food production sectors. Nevertheless, it might increase cyber dangers and make the farming environment worse. As a result of cyberattacks, consumers may consume unsafely, and the economy may suffer. Attackers may operate remotely and deed on-field sensors and entirely self-directed vehicles. The motivation of this chapter is to study various cyber-attacks in the smart farming ecosystem and propose a real-time cybersecurity model for a multi-cloud-based hi-tech farming system.
Top1. Introduction
Advanced technology comes in every aspect of modern life in smart homes, health and fitness, industrial automation, and agriculture. For agriculture to achieve high productivity, growth, and increased demand for agriculture and food products, innovation and technology are necessary. In the past few decades, farming has undergone several revolutionary transformations (Letusgrow, 2022), paving the way for agricultural systems to improve yield, sustainable food production, and livestock management. Based on Industry 4.0 (Eashwar, 2021), agriculture 4.0 has developed to grow crops using a variety of approaches by implementing and integrating new technologies to improve the efficiency of the food web and incorporating cross-industry technology and applications. Since farming has become demand-based, agriculture and food production must integrate data-driven and advanced technologies to increase the quantity and quality of agricultural products (Letusgrow, 2022) and meet the demand of the global market for fresh products (AgriPlast, 2022).
With the help of advanced technologies, farmers and crop growers can gather environmental data and metrics to make smarter decisions. These decisions can allow farmers to improve farming operations by monitoring crop growth, crop selection, weather conditions, flood risk, and pest prevalence. In hi-tech farming, data is created in many forms, such as e-mails, documents, and sensor data from networks, storage, servers, sensors, automated machines, and IoT devices.
Farmers must know how data is transported, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, robotic milkers, soil sensors, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), drone monitoring, supply chains, and other aspects of their farming operations. As farmers and planters become more reliant on digitized data, they become more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Moreover, advanced technologies such as data platforms, wireless sensor networks (WSN), RFID, GPS, and business systems can be vulnerable to breakdown, abuse, and misuse. The growing digital requirements continue to pose new challenges regarding cybersecurity.
1.1 Security Challenges
Cybersecurity is a growing worldwide problem, and the threats and attacks constantly evolve in the environment (Dell, 2020). Cybercriminals can target the food and agriculture industry with cyberattacks to achieve financial gain and social disruption. Integrating emerging technologies can resolve many agriculture problems; however, poor management of resources can negatively impact the safety, quality, quantity, human resources, technology, products, and natural resources. Hi-tech farming leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) and Application Programming Interface (API) technology (Mike Levin 2020) is a great boon and a considerable cybersecurity risk.
Cyberattacks and threats can severely disrupt markets and economies as a rising hub (Ahmadi, Saeed, 2023), and they can also provide an unstable and unsettling atmosphere in the high-tech industry. Cybercriminals can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to steal computers, cloud storage, and smartphone data. They can effectively lock down digital systems using ransomware, then demand a ransom from the creator. The hackers can steal private information from supply chains, greenhouse temperatures, and manufacturing rates. After that, they can sell such data to customers, including rivals. The food delivery network may face difficulties integrating interoperable technologies with agricultural output. Farmers are also increasingly exposed to data security issues and cyberattacks due to networked sensors, smart meters, surveillance cameras, and other equipment. All automated devices used for farming operations are at risk of being hacked.
The problems and challenges the crop growers face in the Hi-tech agricultural system are antivirus updates, fraudulent messages, identifying and stopping threats, lack of speed and accuracy, legitimate connectivity, monitoring e-mails, stealing login credentials, use of advanced technology, etc. Therefore, agricultural systems must use cybersecurity systems with advanced technology, and best practices must be implemented in all farming solutions.