Cybersecurity is a journey, and we would like to help you as you embark on it.
The produce industry has seen a significant increase in the frequency of ransomware and other cyberattacks, some of which recently have directly impacted our own member companies. As a commodity-based industry, we are tightly woven together and reliant on each other and our ancillary suppliers to deliver fresh, perishable produce into the supply chain on a 24/7 basis.
This dependence, the seasonality changes across wide domestic and international boundaries, significantly increases the cyberattack surface for criminals trying to infiltrate our networks for their personal gain.
To address these challenges, the PSO leadership team formed the PSO Cybersecurity Council in December 2021. Since then, a team of 16 IT professionals from 10 U.S. and Canada-based produce companies partnered with subject matter experts, have met regularly in working groups to create best practices and tools to provide produce companies a framework to defend and protect themselves.
We are proud to introduce the first revision of the PSO Cybersecurity Best Practices for Produce Suppliers. These best practices have been created based on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and tailored to fit the needs of our membership and the industry as a whole.
Our Objectives
Make all produce industry suppliers safer from cyberattack by:
1) Developing a culture of transparency and shared communication amongst members and non-members.
2) Creating a lightweight framework, based on NIST standards that is specifically applicable to produce industry suppliers.
3) Creating a set of actionable best practices categorized and based on the above framework.
4) Developing the ability to extend standards to supply chain trading partners.
5) Continuously improve on the best practices by using real world learnings and measured control monitoring.
6) Building an outreach plan to market and distribute the set of best practices to produce suppliers.
To access our best practices click here.