National and Minnesota Report
If you haven’t heard the lasted Donald J Trump (R) pipe dream, he will be reinstalled as President by August. The latest cyberattack on JBS, a multinational Brazilian owned company, hits America right where it hurts just as grilling season is getting underway. This industry is not one people usually think of when their nice cuts of meat are in white pristine packages wrapped in clear plastic, but it is also the hotbed for COVID spread. In April, as many as 334,000 cases of COVID have occurred in this industry alone.
Now, not only being areas of susceptibility to an airborne virus they are subjected to a computer borne one. The Russian-based attack is intended to accomplish multiple missions at the same time. One, to foment fears in different parts of our economy from the petroleum and gas industry to now our food supply. Two, undermine the current administration’s credibility with the American people and three, foster a disbelief that things would be better under Vladimir Putin’s puppet, Donald J Trump.
These issues hit our state directly because of the meatpacking plants in Worthington and Cold Spring, Minnesota. Cyber-terrorism is alive and well and there are numerous other industries in which our state could experience more problems from oil refining to the utility grid, just to mention a couple.
This latest attack is not one past an administration has turned a blind eye toward. In 2015, President Barak Obama took on the issue directly, Obama Calls for New Laws to Bolster Cybersecurity to which he was effectively rebuffed by the US Chamber of Commerce which dragged its feet hoping for a new administration and in January crafted the following letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2016/09/15/coc_rfi_response.pdf which shows their unwillingness to take the matter on directly or take any responsibility in advance.
Now, we are experiencing the aftermath of the lack of planning, development of an approach to making this a common business practice and witnesses to the wreckage created by a pure bottom-line approach to business.