Dr. Darin Detwiler
Appearances
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Today, though, we have such more global, we have such more impact of technology and cyber attacks and all these different things kind of collide to the point it's almost like you went from a single lane road to a multi-lane highway in front of your house. The inherent risks are just greater.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Doesn't mean your house is different, it just means that you have to think about things differently as opposed to the way it was when it was just that single lane road.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Well, I think, too, that we have to separate the nostalgia, if you will. Right. Look, if I were to eat some of my favorite cereal from when I was a kid, it might bring back memories. But you can't think about it in terms of being the same food that it was back, you know, 50 years ago for me.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
There's so many different, you know, ingredients and additives and chemicals and self-stabilizers and dyes and things like that. And a lot of these ingredients come from other parts of the world. Even something as simple as applesauce we're seeing, you know, with the high lead from the cinnamon that comes into it. And I know this isn't cybersecurity, but here's the thing.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
We're not just talking about the cybersecurity of the state I live in. We're not even talking about the cybersecurity of the country that I live in. We have to talk about cybersecurity when it comes to our food and agriculture on a global scale because it's like the whole idea of, you know, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Our global food supply is only as strong when it comes to cybersecurity as the resiliency of any of the locations on the planet. That's right.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
I am a food safety professor and author and advocate, and I help in the areas of awareness, allies, advocacy, and even activism. And specifically, I help people who work in food safety for major corporations where They say, well, we never talk about food safety and I can't get in and the conversation around food safety.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And I say, well, you know, when they're talking about reducing waste and improving upon inefficiencies and maximizing profits and and and, you know, that kind of stuff. That's where you can talk about food safety. When you look at it that way, when you look at the idea of brand reputation and a corporate mission statement, how does food safety relate to that?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
There's another angle of earlier this year, I was in San Francisco at Future Food Tech and And there was a great conversation around, you know, is it regulated? But also there's the economic side of things. When we look at the idea of a venture, so much technology and software and resources, you look at the idea of investors investing.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And the reality is that most investors, if that's where you're getting the funds for technology, whether it's transparency, traceability, digitization, and of course, you can't talk about those three without talking about the idea of securing that information. They want a short return on investment. They want a short term benefit to their investment.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
But we're talking about something that's really more long term. And how do you show that? I mean, how do you show that you didn't have a cyber attack? And it's One of those crazy scenarios where you're trying to justify something before it happens.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And from the finance sector of things, it's hard to be proactive in that sense because you can't really put a dollar amount to it in terms of being proactive and investing into it. Now, after the fact, we can say, oh, this breach ended up costing us $25 million. We'll have to pay that bill. But OK, how come it's so quick to say we'll have to pay that $25 million?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
But when you ask for $2 million to be proactive, well, how do we know that's really going to work?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
How do all these different things relate to that? So I basically help people, I listen, and then I help them reframe the conversation.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
It's so stupid. Well, that's the bodies in the street kind of approach. The idea of, you know, well, we didn't do anything because there was only one death and only 15 states impacted. So, OK, well, so then what's the threshold? How many states had to be impacted? How many businesses had to shut down? How many people had to die or to be in hospital for this to be of concern?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
You know, going back to that idea of that multi-generational, you know, the person who owns the family and being responsible to their family, you know, plot of land and the farmer that's there. You know, we saw this during the pandemic, how many families were, how many family farms, excuse me,
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
were impacted because, you know, well, no one was going to the restaurants and buying all these different things. So now their onions had no place to go or their whatever it was, had no place to go. And we had to shift the business model to to to adapt during that kind of situation. And did we learn any lesson from that? Because
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
During that time, those were families that were essentially not making money at the end of the year. And if anything, they were waiting for government assist programs to help them offset their costs. And with the promise of their – your profits will bounce back next year. You can't operate in that kind of a mode. And even though –
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
a business can have, you know, an economic recovery after an incident, how many families wish that they could have a recovery and a do over after they've been, uh, you know, ridiculously harmed, uh, because of certain failures.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And again, it comes down to, I really like that, that notion of the idea of, is there incentivization to allow it to become a problem for you to deal with it rather than, uh, being proactive. I want to hold out the hope that there are companies that are being proactive, uh, Maybe it's because they've already been stung. Maybe it's because they've seen their competitors be stung.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
But we need to look at the idea of across the board, the idea of the entire sector, the entire commodity, not just the one brand or the one company will be impacted by not being as resilient as possible.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Yeah. You know, again, it's like we collect data and we look at the, how much will it cost to do this? How much will it cost to do this? But we don't typically calculate that idea of the cost of doing nothing. The cost of doing nothing has to be part of the equation because if we ignore it and then we deal with it reactively, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Again, not only do the costs go up, but you got to realize that too, the costs are going to be passed on to the consumer. And in most cases, the consumer doesn't really want to be told that, well, you're paying more because we've messed up. I would rather be told I'm paying more because we're going to make it more resilient and a safer product down the road. I could buy into that a lot more.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
There's a lot of things that we can agree to pay more for. But there's also an element in terms of corporate social responsibility. At what point are you not being a responsible executive if you have knowledge but you don't act on that knowledge?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
When we look at the responsible corporate officer doctrine that came from a 1975 Supreme Court decision in Parkview, U.S., it didn't say that if bad things happen to you, you will be held strictly and personally liable for those. What it said is that, you know, things happen.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
and you deal with it but if you don't deal with it if you have knowledge of these things and you don't act to prevent to mitigate to to to resolve these issues then there is a point where you should be held responsible because you knew better and you could have done something different i think that having these events there's got to be you know i didn't see a lot of people like from major food brands there for instance right i mean this wasn't really a food event but but
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Imagine if it was really advertised as to, hey, if you're a corporate executive for major food companies, you should be there.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
I know for a fact that there's people that they do gravitate to certain things, but they also avoid certain things because if they've been involved in this conversation for a long time, they can't have that kind of plausible deniability of I just didn't know how bad it was.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And as crazy and conspiratorial as that may sound, that is a bit of reality in terms of, well, we don't want to collect data on this because if we collect data, it could be held against us or it could be used to prove that we knew about the problem all along. I hear this over and over and over again. And I think the same thing can apply here in terms of cybersecurity.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Kristen, can I make a dark prediction here?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
I want to preface this by saying that I hope I'm not accurate here. Within the next five years, there will be a cyber attack that impacts our food industry, and it will be referred to as the 9-11 of cybersecurity. And we will see additions to our Department of Homeland Security. We will see perhaps our own new...
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
kind of like how we just added the space force we'll have our own u.s cyber security force we will have uh federally created jobs much like the tsa but within the the food industry because of cyber attacks and it'll be thought of as this uh this this brand new awakening that we you know we have to do something about there'll be billions and billions of dollars allocated to this
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
This will be heralded as the, like you said, or like someone said, the corner piece of someone's political legacy for what they did in this and what we do going forward as a nation. And, you know, it'll be almost referred to as the TSA of the food industry, these people that work in those contexts. But it is very likely that something like this will happen. And why can't it happen?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
You know, looking at our political state right now, I don't see any reason why it's without of the scope of it happening within the next five years.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And, you know, we'll look back on this and go, remember when we talked about cybersecurity and it was just like, you know, an additional condiment on the table at a restaurant, you know, some have it, some don't, some like it, some don't, some go big, some go small, some ignore the whatever. And then you look at the idea of.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
30 years from now, so in the year 2060, there'll be a whole crop of people that are like, we've always had this level of cybersecurity and government interest in this because they don't know any better. They don't realize how many people were literally like the three of us talking about these things back in the year 2024.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Remember D.A.R.E.?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Yeah, it'll be like the new D.A.R.E. They still have that, Darren.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
I'm just saying it'll be the new D.A.R.E.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
On the conservative end of things, when we hear about a recall, it's like the incident at the at the most soonest is six to eight weeks old, if not older. Even with the the recent thing with onions at McDonald's, those, you know, we found out about it on that that that Tuesday after after someone went and played cosplay with French fries at McDonald's. But but
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
You were talking about people who got sick early the month prior. So it's like, OK, the companies and the government knows about things and then there's a timeline and then the public knows about things. So, Andrew, you know, you're you're you're very likely correct in terms of the fact that something could have happened four or five, six, seven, eight weeks ago.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And, you know, we just haven't heard about it as a as a populace yet.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Well, first off, on election day, my wife brought me some Boston baked beans. She knows that when I was a kid, I always thought they were like the best medicine in the world. And so there's that. But a funny kind of story is that I was recently in Nashville and And I thought, oh, if I'm gonna be a natural, I wanna get some ribs. And so the hotel, we're like, hey, where's a good place to get ribs?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
They're like, oh, go to this place. So we go to this place, we sit down, and then we like, okay, well, there's no ribs on the menu. And the server was like, yeah, we don't sell ribs. We've never sold ribs. Okay, so where should we go? So we went to this other restaurant, and they did sell ribs. So we ordered like a rack of ribs.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And you order a drink and an appetizer, and all of a sudden the server comes back and goes, I am so sorry. We have now sold out of all there is. I'm like, are you serious? So we ended up eating brisket. And then the next day we went to another restaurant. And this, again, definitely had ribs. Everyone recommended it. We took a lift clear across town.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
We get there and there's like two freaking buses of basketball players getting off. And we're like, quick, get in quick. Meet the basketball team. We do not want to. Have the two basketball teams eat all the ribs kind of thing. Because it's like, we're not going to miss this opportunity to have ribs in Nashville. We did have ribs. It was good.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And then everyone said, oh, you need to go to this place here. So our last night, we went to this Tex-Mex place and ordered an enchilada and a taco. And the taco meat, my wife, before I was going to bite into the taco, she goes, hey, you might not want to bite into that. Because the taco meat was so undercooked. It was red. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
No, it was very, very, very, very undercooked. And the person in charge tried to give me excuses. And anyway, then offered me a coupon to come back. I'm like, no, I'm not coming back. Wow. Nashville did me wrong.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
I did have some banana pudding when we were there. And even not just banana pudding, but banana pudding with a shot of bourbon on top.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
I think you've changed the nature of this podcast to a different form.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
You know, walking into the facility, there were so many people that were selling products and services. And then you see this area where we had the stage and the audience. And, you know, there were some great questions from the audience. I think that there was a general, you know, desire of attendees to really kind of focus on some issues and some people coming into this.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
You know, it wasn't like, hey, I'm a blank slate and I want to learn about this from before. It was more like I've been dealing with this. Thank God there's someone who's who's talking about this, you know, because everyone I talk to, it's like hitting a brick wall. And now I'm going to talk to these folks about these issues and how does this apply to this and what's an example of that?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And I think it kind of goes back to to what I said in terms of the conversation I had earlier this morning, when people have a hard time talking with the people above them about, like, let's say food safety.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Many times there's a disconnect between the people who make the purchase decisions and the executive decisions when it go down a road, especially when you're looking at the idea of cybersecurity, right? And the people who are literally dealing with the using of the tools and resources and dealing with the day in and day out issues around resiliency.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And I think that there's a bit of an opportunity when we had this conversation there to be like, okay, you know, what are the messages that we can help impart to these people who then are going to take what they learned from our panel to the next level wherever they work in terms of, okay, we need to consider this. We need to talk about it in terms of these terms.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
That was my biggest takeaway was it was a it was an audience that was receptive to how can we strengthen not just, you know, cybersecurity resilience, but our conversation with cybersecurity resilience to the people above us and It wasn't like a one shining moment.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
It was like every kind of experience from that our panel was along that lines of we're talking to the people who are going to be the change agents within their within within their company, within their corporate sector, whatever.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
You know, I only ever see people like in public health service. And I noted it wasn't just like a recruiter or a marketing person. There were a lot of people with a lot of different ranks there with the Canadian cybersecurity force in uniform. That wasn't that was something I noticed as well.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
There was some good conference swag there, too.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Oh, yeah. There was like a plastic, you know, reusable bento box.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Perhaps one thing to consider is that, you know, food and agriculture, you know, it's kind of like universal. You know, we can be talking about sports or we could there's so many things we could be talking about that just it doesn't translate as well. Whereas, you know, talking about food and agriculture, because that doesn't just impact people.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
If it doesn't impact them in terms of their their specific job and their their sector, it impacts them in terms of, you know, their home, their their their families, their their personal elements. So we can talk about language barriers, but we can talk about how, you know, food is a unified type of a concern that everyone has.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
And that some of the specific examples, and Andrew was bringing up some really incredible examples, you know, you could almost talk about how those examples applied in any, you know, any geographic or political location. It's just that we have to talk about it on a bit more of a global scale because, you know, you look at the idea of Let's say we were talking about the 1970s.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Cyber Resilience in Food and Agriculture: Andrew Rose & Dr. Darin Detwiler (Part 1)
Most people, you don't have the internet, obviously. You don't have nearly as much global food distribution and supply. Most of your food comes from, a greater percentage comes from the state you live in, in the United States. And I would imagine even up in Canada, it probably comes from the province you live in more so than others.