Dairy Processing - January/February 2024 - 36

OPERATIONS
senior manager for environment, health, safety and security
for Le Mars, Iowa-based Wells Enterprises. In addition to slips,
trips and falls, he said creating a workplace that promotes
proper ergonomics is also important.
Hazards for potential injuries are especially prevalent for
the dairy industry because the industry processes a product
that must stay cold or frozen, leading many employees to
rush and potentially make incorrect decisions for fear the
product will spoil and cause the company a loss, said Andy
Woerdehoff, safety and health manager for Wells Enterprises.
Junck said the EHS management system Wells Enterprises
uses has helped inform company leadership on how to
support employees, as well as standardize procedures across
plants to better minimize risks of injuries, review incidents
and develop effective corrective actions.
PREVENTING CYBER ATTACKS
Cyber attacks not only can result in significant monetary
impacts, but also have the potential to be physically
dangerous and destructive to employees and consumers,
said Jonathan Braley, operations manager for the Food and
Agriculture Information Sharing and Analysis Center. To
this end, he said the security of operational technology and
industrial control systems should be prioritized.
" There is a lot of machinery dealing with specific
pressures, temperatures and refrigeration, so if an attacker
were able to get into these industrial control systems and
alter some of those levels, you could be dealing with loss of
product and the sale of tainted products, " Braley said.
36 JAN-FEB 2024 | DAIRYPROCESSING.COM
Additionally, attackers causing machines to turn off or
on improperly or without notice poses a significant physical
risk to workers. Email security is crucial to preventing these
attacks, as most attacks begin with a phishing scheme, so
Braley said having multifactor authentication is important.
There have been recent incidents in the water sector with
some programmable logic controllers being impacted by geopolitically
motivated attackers, Braley said. These attacks have
disrupted systems, but the water sector has additional safety
controls in place that prevented these disruptions from causing
widespread concerns regarding water safety.
The possibility of similar threats should be top of mind
for dairy processors. Additionally, keeping the right mindset
is essential, but Braley said some companies feel they are too
small for an attack.
" Most of the cyber attacks we're seeing, especially against
manufacturing, are opportunistic, " Braley said. " It's not like a
threat actor said, 'I'm going to go after some dairy companies.'
They are going to scan the web, find anything that's publicly
exposed, and then they're going to test vulnerabilities against it.
So even though you are small, if you have poor security practices,
you are probably going to be the one that's going to get hit. "
Ransomware is one of the biggest threats, and Braley
said because the industry relies on just-in-time delivery of
products, even small delays can have a significant impact on
food delivery. As a result, some ransomware operators have
targeted food production knowing they are more likely to pay
the ransom to restore operations quickly.
Updating software, using unique passwords and
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Dairy Processing - January/February 2024

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