Cyberespionage: Socioeconomic implications on sustainable food security

Abstract Sustainable food security is a vision of many governments and international organizations across the globe with its goal directed at preventing hunger, starvation, food shortages, and mortality. These are dreaded indicators that had been long fingered as principal problems that would envelop the world around 2050 when the global population is estimated to hit 9 billion. Global organizations such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Heifer International, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, etc., have consistently demonstrated strategies that would help eradicate global hunger by 2030. As sustained efforts are directed at thousands of remarkable projects worldwide, it is important to reemphasize that such projects could only be realized through insights derived from meaningful information and knowledge resources. In agriculture, there has been a rapid rise of late in the modernization and deployment of automated agricultural information systems (agricultural databases, smart systems, Internet of Things (IoT) systems, agribots, etc.) to aid planning, production, and distribution processes. Interestingly, most of these global knowledge and information bases are in the cloud and other Internet infrastructure. The trend in global information storage has sensitive information (government policies, orders, decisions, plans, etc., on agriculture and food production) from public and private domains residing on one or more cyberinfrastructures. That leads to an attendant risk of sabotage and breaches. This is due to the ever-growing attempts on critical infrastructure worldwide by apologists, cyberterrorists, and cybercriminals. This could result in project failures, irrecoverable losses, and governance and policy failures, to name a few. This chapter presents a detailed account of the various cyberthreats, especially cyberespionage and cyberterrorism that are capable of sabotaging the collective strategies of organizations and entities pursuing sustainable food security. In this chapter, we discuss motivations, ideologies, and strategies behind cyberespionage against agriculture and related platforms; the architecture, categorization, propagation, and attack methods; the socioeconomic implications of these attacks; countermeasures; and legal frameworks.