Michael Urbanik
Appearances
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Some good conversation going on here. I think Hannah's perfectly right. You know, you need to have a good level or a healthy level of skepticism and treat things with common sense.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
and it can be challenging with farm or any sort of animal production area or grow area because it's a large space and it's hard to secure a large space you know this isn't like a simple shop downtown where you have a door and maybe one or two entry points you know 360 degrees around the perimeter people could you know
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
jump offense or climb a tree or get over and it is hard so you need to secure what you can have a healthy level of skepticism those are the things that you're going to want to do to protect yourself and what insurance carriers are going to want you to do so you can become insured and get a good, reasonable price when it comes to property insurance.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And, you know, that's kind of the tangible stuff. You know, then you can talk more about the intangible stuff, which is computers. And, you know, any industry that uses a computer is susceptible to digital attacks, cyber activism, hacking, just being a target.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And the question, I think if you're a business owner, you're listening to this and you ask yourself, if I lost use of my computers for a week, two weeks, How would that interrupt my operation? And maybe 10 years ago, you might say, oh, not that much. I could keep rocking and rolling without those. But I think every business nowadays would be seriously hampered and damaged.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And the way technology works is it just becomes more easy and more accessible every year. So that's why we see we've seen a monumental shift in number of cyber attacks. across all industries that the number only goes up every year because the barrier to entry to becoming a cyber criminal is very minimal.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Almost anyone can just go buy a laptop, a phone and start sending phishing emails, sending, you know, spoof voicemails, what have you. They get one critical piece of information. They can do something with it. Or then we talked about as basically crime as a service. They can solicit, you know, someone who knows what to do.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
sell that little password that they had, and then they might get 25% of all of the money that comes later. And then we can talk, who are these people doing these crimes? But it's sad to talk about because it's a growth of an industry that we all would not like to see grow. But that's the reality. And business owners just have to be very mindful.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And there are steps and measures you can take to preventing that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Hey guys, my name is Michael Urbanik. I'm an insurance agent with Arcade Tongue, over a hundred year old brokerage just out of Baltimore. I live down in the Richmond area, but you know, where I fit in all this is working with clients, businesses, understanding what risks do they face and
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Any business has a myriad of risks and they only keep evolving and then helping them finding ways to transfer that risk, whether it's via traditional insurance programs, self-retention groups, self-insuring to make sure that they're geared up facing all the threats that avail them. So, yeah, excited to be here.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Yeah, luckily there are solutions, right? And I'll say first, for a lot of things, for anything destructive act, an attack, damage to fall into this terrorism category and what we call like definitional terrorism by the courts, it's pretty rare. this is pretty rare. I'm going to stand up for my insurance carriers for a moment.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
I know a lot of people don't have a high view of them, but insurance carriers, they do want to pay claims. They don't want to get someone on a technicality and say like, oh no, this is technically this, we're not going to pay it. Carriers don't want to have a bad name in the industry, so they want to pay claims. So let's just talk about a couple things, or recap a couple things.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
So one might be like a physical damage attack on your property. They break into your property, they damage your cages, your property. That's going to fall under your general liability business owner's property policy. And what you can do on that policy as we talk about agro-terrorism is you can opt in for anywhere from like $0 to $200 a year for terrorism coverage.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
So that's a very simple thing, you know, was set up by this terrorism act. If this is a concern to you, call your insurance agent and say, hey, look, do I have this optional endorsement that gives me back coverage for acts of terrorism? And that's going to fall into the property category. And, you know, they can say, you know, no, you don't have it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And then you can say, OK, well, what's it going to cost to add it? And it's going to be a pretty nominal fee because of, you know, just how this act works. They want to make this very easy to afford and very easy to say yes to getting. And again, these these type of definitional terrorism attacks are pretty rare.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
So that's the first thing I would say is call your insurance agent, review your insurance policy, make sure it's adequate for your risks and, you know, ask about this terrorism coverage.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
The second component is when we talk about this digital, these digital attacks, get a standalone cyber liability policy that's going to give you business interruption coverage, because that's a big thing that can come of all this that people don't think like, yes, they put malware on my computer. I have to throw away all my computers. I have to get new computers, reinstall them.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
There's a dollar cost there. But all that time, you might have lost income as part of it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
a standalone cyber liability policy it's going to give you protection for your assets protection for your financial assets via cyber attack and then also protection for loss of income you know in preparation for this call i took a couple calls with some cyber insurance carriers and when these foreign actors attack because these attacks can come from russian black hat cyber attack gangs north koreans
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
There's other places that they come from that originated overseas. People might think, oh, are these acts of terror or are these acts of war because it's coming from, you know, a foreign source? Those claims are being paid right now. They are not because those attacks are happening and carriers are paying those claims and damages.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
They're not trying to throw them out because of where they come from. Now, we could just always be one political step away from now that country being on a different list and now that attacks viewed differently. I can't say with certain how that'll be interpreted. We'll just have to let the carriers and the courts and Congress deal with that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
But these policies do cover and pay and they protect from foreign sources. And again, you can get on that an optional terrorism coverage. And I think I looked at a quote for one of my clients and it was zero dollars to add that. So they're getting that coverage. So those are tools that are available to pretty much every business. They're very accessible at this stage.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Don't miss the forest through the trees here. Talk to your agent. Spend maybe a few more dollars. I know everyone wants more dollars from you everywhere. That's not lost on me. I'm sympathetic to all small business owners. But these are very prudent ways to protect yourself.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Listeners are definitely going to want to know. I'll jump in on that real quick. And Andrew and I have talked about this. So right now, when it comes to, I'll say insurance products, and you can view this question through a couple of different lenses. But when it comes to insurance, these products have been available for a long time.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
But the awareness component or understanding from the business owner that this is what they need has been really lacking. And, you know, I'll give you some anecdotal evidence. So the number one and two industries that are targeted by cyber attacks are financial and medical industries, just because if they sit down the computers, it all goes to heck real quick. But we knew that years and years ago.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
But I'll say this year, cyber liability was probably my number two highest purchased insurance policy by business owners. It takes a long time for that message to just permeate the industries. And I'll tell you the anecdotal story is everyone now knows another practice owner or business owner that's had a cyber attack. And they're like, if that can happen to him, I'm not very different.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
It can happen to me. So that's the type of stuff. Unfortunately, lessons learned the hard way is why people have been adopting this or taking advantage. Because up to this point, I think a lot of people think it's like, oh, that happens in movies or that happens to big companies. No, the dollars are there on the table. The bad guys know this.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
They're moving down industry to smaller businesses because they haven't put the tools and resources in place to protect themselves yet.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Yeah, exactly. And hey, it might be not that retirement job that they pull, but it might get them over and pay $10,000. That sucks to lose. But if they're putting that into their pocket in, let's say, North Korea or another country, that gets them a lot of money. Those dollars go much further. So there's a lot to unpack there. But that, to me, anecdotally, it's happening. It's real. Take the
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Take my word for it. We file claims every year for businesses that say, hey, this happened. And I get to say, yes, this is what we do next. You have a policy or no. We talked about this and you opted not to do anything. You got to figure this out on my own. And I'd much rather have that first conversation than the second one.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Yeah, I'll say a recent food fixation of mine is my wife, I and some friends went to a hot pot restaurant here in Richmond. And that was my first time going. And I think we probably sat there for three hours just eating and talking. And a lot of different foods and meats and stuff I'd never had before. So that was a really awesome recent experience and definitely want to go back.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Yeah, I'll give two. One is, you know, the things we talked about can be addressed. You know, you have to own the risk as a business owner. You have to manage it and control it. You can't just pass the buck. But it is achievable. There are carriers, there are tools available to you to help ensure this and protect yourself at a reasonable cost. And then I'll go back to my second point.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Number one prevalent type of attack in the digital space right now, it's gone back up phishing attacks. It is the human element that they are targeting, getting you to respond to a fake email, getting your employee to send something they shouldn't. Turn on multi-factor authentication. These things are free. They're easy to do if you have a Google Gmail. But that is the number one.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And then, you know, food memory. I was talking to my wife about this. My mom used to have an old school mixer and, you know, with the beaters that would spin and she would make cookies. around Christmas time. And I remember always getting past the beater and licking the cookie dough off of the beater. So we're talking about that. And that's like a very fond memory, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
They're still attacking the human. So you got to traverse this digital space with good air of caution about you. Okay.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
That sits in my mind of eating cookie dough off those beaters.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
Yeah. So, you know, if I'm going to define it, I'm going to kind of go to what the government officials are going to define it. And I'm sure as this conversation progresses, we'll we'll go back and we'll talk about events following September 11th. And what is terrorism? Because that's going to factor into insurance pretty substantially.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
My goodness. So that'll go back to the, you know, what we pulled is kind of going back to that. There's a risk insurance act that was passed following the attacks of September 11th back in 2001. The act was passed in 2002. Obviously that space, that ideological space has been built out substantially because we really had to think critically what is terrorism and define it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And that's a very, very hard thing to do. But if we talk about agro-terrorism and I'm going off the FBI's definition now, so we're pretty far into the chapter here, but it's a substance of bioterrorism is defined as the deliberate introduction of an animal or plant disease for the purpose of generating fear, causing economic losses or undermining social stability.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
So that's what the FBI is defining it as. And then, you know, we can say, well, what what is terrorism here and what is war? And you're right, Andrew, we had a couple you touched on a couple of keystones there. So certified acts of terrorism is defined by the U S government.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And it's one acts resulting in insured losses that in excess of $5 million in aggregate attributable to all types of insurance subject by the terrorism risk insurance act. The act is,
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
violent in nature, dangerous to human life property or infrastructure, and is committed by an individual or individuals as part of an effort to coerce civilian participation of the United States or to influence the policy and affect the conduct of the United States government by the coercion.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
terrorism excludes or the inapplicability or omission of a terrorism exclusion do not create coverage or injure or damage otherwise excluded under this policy. So that's a lot. It's thick legal language. It's a lot of stuff that the normal lay person doesn't think about. But the concept behind this was September 11th was really an unprecedented attack.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
How do insurance companies deal with a risk like this and how does the U.S. government help them? So they more or less attempted to define what is going to fall into this category, what type of loss they put a definition to it, and then they put a threshold saying, OK, if damages exceed this amount, then it's going to fall into this risk bucket.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack
And that's where the US government and taxpayer dollars can come in to help indemnify and support because terrorism is different than acts of war. Acts of war are completely excluded under all insurance policies. So we're trying to, I guess, give some black and white to this very gray space. And it's an evolving topic.