Explore the fusion of technology and traditional farming with Sean Martin and Phillip Miller, as they discuss the transformative impact of cybersecurity and innovation on agriculture. This episode reveals the vital role of tech in modern farming and the emerging challenges of securing the food production landscape against cyber threats.
Guest: Phillip Miller, Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer, Qurple
On LinkedIn | https://linkedin.com/in/pemiller
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Host: Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast [@RedefiningCyber]
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/sean-martin
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Episode Notes
In this new episode of the Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast, host Sean Martin dove into an enlightening conversation with Phillip Miller, a figure well-versed in the nexus between cybersecurity, technology, and agriculture. This dialogue shed light on the less-acknowledged side of farming—a sector increasingly reliant on technological advancements and, consequently, the need for robust cybersecurity measures.
Agriculture, often perceived as a traditional field far removed from the high-tech buzz of the modern world, is undergoing a quiet revolution. With innovations ranging from drone technology to sophisticated IoT systems for monitoring crop health, the farm of the future is here.
Phillip, with his diverse background ranging from app development to infrastructure and cybersecurity, brings a unique perspective to the table. His dual role as a farmer and technologist allows him to see firsthand the impact of technology on agriculture and the critical importance of cybersecurity in safeguarding this vital industry. The conversation explored how the adoption of technology in farming goes beyond mere mechanization.
Today, tractors are internet-connected, and irrigation systems can be managed remotely, allowing for a level of precision farming previously unattainable. However, this technological leap comes with its risks. The cybersecurity vulnerabilities inherent in many modern systems pose a significant threat to the reliability and safety of food production. Phillip's insights into how these technological tools have transformed the farming landscape are fascinating.
From increased efficiency and reduced labor requirements to the enhanced ability to predict and respond to environmental conditions, technology offers numerous benefits. Yet, as Phillip pointed out, the reliance on tech also introduces complexity, particularly when it comes to securing farm data against cyber threats. His experiences reflect a broader trend where industries traditionally viewed as non-technical are now at the forefront of adopting cutting-edge technologies.
The discussion between Sean Martin and Phillip Miller underscores a crucial message: cybersecurity is not just a concern for typical tech sectors but is equally vital in areas like agriculture that are becoming increasingly digital. As we move towards more technologically driven farming practices, the need for cyber resilience in agriculture cannot be overstated. This episode serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of technology, security, and the basic human need for food, highlighting the evolving role of cybersecurity in every aspect of our lives.
Key Questions Addressed
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Resources
Hacking Success: how owners and officers should cultivate policy for cybersecurity and use of artificial intelligence (book): https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hacking-success-phillip-miller/1145240507?ean=9798990386402
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Seeds, Sensors, and Security: Harvesting Safety Across the New Terrain of Tech-Enabled Agriculture | A Conversation with Phillip Miller | Redefining CyberSecurity with Sean Martin
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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Sean Martin: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody. This is Sean Martin, your host of the redefining cybersecurity podcast. And, uh, as you know, if you listen to the show, I have the joy of talking to super cool and smart people about how we can operationalize cybersecurity for the benefit of the business. And, uh, I don't know if. Many people think about farming as a business.
I don't know if it would make the top 10 people. So what are the top 10 businesses you think about? It's probably going to retail, right? Banking, the things that they interact with most of the time, and they might lump food, food supply in, in retail and not really, uh, go back to where, to the source of all, of all the stuff that we consume every day.
And, uh, so. When I saw Philip and we connected, I was like, a CISO, a farmer, a teacher. Technologist, uh, interested in [00:01:00] cybersecurity, a fellow CISSP. I thought, let's have a good chat about farming, food supply, technology, cybersecurity, and all that good stuff. And, uh, you have a great, a great past and a great background that I think, uh, kind of shapes your thoughts on this.
I'm interested in getting into that as well. And, uh, you have a book coming out and so we're going to talk a little bit about that hacking success. And, uh, I think you use some, some farming examples in that to, uh, to help illustrate some things. So Philip is a fan, a fantastic pleasure to have you on the show.
Thanks for joining me.
Phillip Miller: All right. Thanks, Sean. It's great to be here.
Sean Martin: And before we kick it into gear on. Maybe a few words about some of the things you've been up to over the years and what you're up to now.
Phillip Miller: All right, perfect. Yeah, I've had the great pleasure of doing everything from app dev to infrastructure.
Most recently, probably the last 10, 15 years or so, cybersecurity. And throughout all of these things, a few [00:02:00] things remain constant, right? How do we deliver better outcomes for our businesses? And for me, it's also not just about the business, it's about the people who use the products that a business produces.
And I think that's perhaps also why the whole farming thing is such embedded in my DNA and my experience of how I do things because connecting directly with the consumers of our products. Originally, our farm was focused on meat, but now we focus entirely on forage food, which is What the animals eat that we in turn may choose to eat or not eat.
So, um, it's kind of a, a life cycle circle from those building blocks of learning how to build applications to learning how to run those applications efficiently on infrastructure and then how to secure those kind of mirrors that life cycle of, okay, we, we, we learn how to plant seeds in the ground and nurture them and watch them grow, keep them alive.
[00:03:00] And then. You know, they produce a fruit that either we as humans eat or other animals. So a lot of great parallels there in terms of the, uh, ethic and the ethos and the things that you have to bring to bear to be successful.
Sean Martin: Yeah. I'm excited to get into those, uh, parallels. I quickly want to go back to some of your experiences.
Um, a lot of retail, uh, uh, Payless shoes, Brooks Brothers. Um, you spent some time at, uh, at AWS and then at net app. And how did those experiences impact how you view Technology and cyber security on the farm.
Phillip Miller: Yeah, sure, so.
Sean Martin: I think it gave you a kind of a head start compared to maybe some other farmers or?
Phillip Miller: Well, so it was while I was at Payless that we started farming. So Payless was headquartered in Topeka, Kansas. And I would say, you know, I had a [00:04:00] 90 mile commute from my home farm into the office and almost all of that was through farmland. And everybody at work had some kind of a farming story. Either they had a farm on the side or their grandparents or their parents were involved in farming.
Some kind of a family farm, uh, involvement, but as a, as a business, right? Uh, we, we worked in the data center, right? We talk about server farms and that technology at the time, right? We're talking about, uh, you know, late two thousands was an evolving time. We were moving from predominantly, uh, virtualized machines starting to eke into cloud computing.
We were starting to see changes in the way that people ran applications. Software as a service was really becoming a major thing and ERP systems were starting to, uh, become be redesigned, re imagined to have better front end application experiences. And so [00:05:00] I got to be on the forefront of those things, obviously e commerce, uh, CRM, lots of mergers and acquisition type activity.
Uh, and, and throughout all of those, I think it prepared me for that next step, uh, working at Brooks Brothers, which was, you know, a different kind of retail experience Payless was serving. Every customer out there, I mean, about a third of Americans at the time were pay less, you source consumers, whereas Brooks Brothers works more in a, uh, a niche market, right?
It's a, it's an upscale lifestyle brand. And when looking at the technology and the customer, that experience has to be elevated reliability. Is no longer just confined to, you know, can I process a transaction? It's about, can I deliver that end to end experience that an employee needs to deliver to that customer when they come into the shop, so much richer experience and also, you know, sort of embedding the technology in a more seamless [00:06:00] way in the store experience.
So that was a great, great opportunity there at Brooks Brothers. And from there, I went to Amazon, uh, is a. Advisory consultant in the security advisory and assurance practice. And there I worked with lots of other major brands around the world, helping them with that transition to the cloud. Something that I'd done for Brooks Brothers while I was there.
And. You know, a lot of those farming themes were coming very much to the fore during this time period because customers would look for, I have this thing, but it's not a physical thing anymore. It's very intangible and I'm moving my data center into the cloud. Am I really moving it? You know what's happening with these applications?
And so I started telling more and more farming stories. To help people understand that, yes, there's, uh, connections with supply chain, there's connections with nurturing and growing [00:07:00] things and using those those parallels from our experiences as growers to help people understand, you know, what's this builder culture like when you're working in the cloud?
How do we now think about? Uh, you know, container based solutions as opposed to applications and, you know, if I, if I delve into some of the agricultural concepts, it's very similar now to how we procure chicken. You know, in the old days, right? Every farm had a few chickens and you might, uh, have somebody who'd go around farm to farm and buy up chickens and bring them to the butcher who then, you know, serve them in the small butcher shop.
Now it's a very detailed integrated supply chain. Where there are hatcheries that produce the, the hens, and then there's loan companies that make sure everybody has the funds to, to, to buy the hens and then transport companies, there's the people who have the hen houses, the actual farmers that grow [00:08:00] them, people that then take them for, uh, you know, slaughter and processing.
And these very tightly integrated chains can be broken up into little units, very similar to how we think about running a business on containers. where each little piece, each, each microservice or each container now has to work both completely input and output in and of itself, but then interact in a broader way with other products and services.
And, you know, that's something I was able to bring to NetApp is this sort of experience of, uh, large scale cloud based solutions. Uh, for, for their world, which was, uh, you know, at the time, very, uh, focused on how to move deeper into the cloud based world.
Sean Martin: So help me with this, Philip. Um, my I'm generalizing here, but I, I think a lot of organizations, [00:09:00] certainly the folks that I talked to, um, focus really heavily on the technology.
What technology can we acquire to accomplish something, but, but then it's driven by the technology. And I'm wondering. In, in the examples you just gave with the farming, it, it seems that perhaps farmers have, have a, maybe more of an outside in view of here's, we need to get this food to the speed to the chicken, the chicken to the, to the house, the house to the, or the, those chickens to the, uh, to the right place.
And how do we, how do we do that with. Technology, because I, I don't know, I think about there's technology all over the farm, right? Tractors. I'm sure there's a bunch of software applications to manage books and things like that. But when you start talking about a supply chain and an ecosystem of, of [00:10:00] growers and transporters and producers and retailers and the whole shoot and match, um, It can get pretty complex, and to understand your place in the chain, and to ensure that you're upholding your end of the bargain, um, certainly availability becomes an issue, but how do, I guess really what I want, not everybody listening is a farmer here, so what, what can the, the CISO not on a farm learn from the farming CISO?
That kind of takes them out, assuming they're in deep in the tech. How do I get the tech to do what I want it to do? Give them a more broader view of the business and what the outcomes are.
Phillip Miller: Yes, I think first of all, for a farmer, you're right. We focus on outcomes, right? What is the goal of what I'm doing?
Uh, for, for me on my hay farm, I'm producing forage to satisfy local area growers who need hay for their livestock. For me, that's a relatively [00:11:00] simple part of a much broader supply chain, right? Because that livestock is going to other places, but I focus on, I have to deliver X number of bales of hay over the course of a, of a year to my customers.
How I do that then dictates what technology I might need. So, yes, I could probably do it all with a horse and a couple of pieces of, uh, equipment from the early 1900s, but I don't have enough time to do that, right? So the, the time pressures lead to technology decisions. And as time goes on, right, you might improve that technology in order to deliver, uh, either a higher level of output or an output with fewer inputs.
Thanks. That same mindset applies to really any business, but if as a CISO, you're focused too much on the technology, you start to lose that connection with what your customers are looking [00:12:00] for. So my advice really to every CISO out there is go back to the core, right? What is it your company does? Why does your company do it?
Who are the customers that you're doing it for? And, and then what is that business policy? Not, I'm not talking about rules or, you know, uh, cyber security do's and do nots. What, what's the business policy that you need to have in order to satisfy those customers to deliver continuity of, of service or, uh, you know, availability of products or pricing?
And that's really how most pharmas see it is, yeah, I get up every day. And I'm going to do these actions, not because, uh, it's on my to do list. I'm doing them because I've made commitments. I've made promises. So farmers are very much into that, uh, mindset of, uh, I I've told somebody that I'm going to do something for a lot of handshake deals still, right.
Even in the very large businesses, the large [00:13:00] corporations. There are miniature suppliers who are committed to, yeah, I'm going to deliver 5, 000 hens every eight weeks to Tyson, let's say. And all of these together form, you know, what we expect as customers of say, uh, Kroger or Albertsons, right? I want to go to the grocery store.
I expect to find chicken there. And if I don't find chicken there, I have no idea which farmer down the line has caused the problem. I don't know if it's avian flu in Texas that has, you know, caused a lot of birds to be wiped out that is now making the egg prices elevated in my grocery store down there.
But as farmers, we take this very personally, right? We look at it and say, okay, we've had a failure point. We can't let that happen again. And I think every CISO takes that same sort of mindset in incident response. For them, Every time we have an incident, some kind of a failure of [00:14:00] something and they want to get to the root cause.
How do we make sure this doesn't happen again? And for farmers, we're more likely to look at the, uh, the technology is an obstacle, a reason perhaps why things didn't go the way they should have gone. But as a CSO in a tech company, you're more looking at the human side, right? Can we, uh, do process improvement?
Can we automate? Can we reduce humans out of the equation? Uh, a farmer may have the opposite viewpoint and kind of bringing those two together in my mind, uh, I think has helped me a lot in, in trying to, you know, keep both the farm operation going successfully and security operations in large enterprises.
Sean Martin: So talk to me a bit about, maybe we can, if you want to focus on your own farm, that's fine, or other examples, but I'm picturing a field one year, you need to produce so many acres and the next year you [00:15:00] see the demand for double the, double the amount, and you want to buy another field, but that feels a few miles or another County or something, right?
So now, so now we have. Multiple fields. And what I'm trying to understand is the technology on the field and then scaling that, um, because you have and the people, I guess, is the other point I want to bring out here is you have workers on the field. You have technology. It might be simple, like, like water, but I presume that's all controlled by.
Some computer at some point to say, am I based on the sun and the weather and the saturation of the ground? I, I need to water this area of the field, a certain amount in this area, another amount. And so maybe a picture of the technology, cause I think that that view will help people understand how a farm looks.
And then maybe in the scaling example that I started off with, how can you [00:16:00] get. An existing field, solid, and then scale that out. It probably ties to containers and cloud and things like that, but you can't put a person in the cloud, right? That's right. And I think, I think there's some, something in there as well, perhaps.
Phillip Miller: Yeah, so the, the, the farms of a hundred years ago, right? Very little mechanization, tractors were, uh, Getting to be almost ubiquitous, but not, not across the board, um, in the larger farms, but the size of the acreage that was being managed was pretty small. The number of people on the farms was tremendous, right?
Your typical farm may have had 15 to 20 employees. Now, today's farmers most likely going to be over 60 years old and finding somebody else who wants to work on the farm, uh, is challenging, right? May have a family member or two that's in it with them. So we turned to technology and all of those things that used to be done by hand can now be automated.
Everything from the irrigation systems, you know, we, [00:17:00] we used to have, uh, pumps that we would go out and, you know, you start the pump. And you wait there until it's done its thing, and then we had, you know, mechanical timers. Now those things are internet connected over LTE, and you can go to a web page, right, and you can see your fields.
Um, but we don't have to check the moisture in the field anymore, right? We've got IoT based sensors that automatically check the moisture and feed it up into the same computer systems that you can then use to, you know, Build routines just like at home, right? You might have Alexa and you can configure a routine in there.
You can do the same with with agricultural solutions and then the tractors, right? They can read that data as you're planting a field or applying fertilizer. It can read data from senses directly in the field. So all of these things enable that farmer to manage greater acreage with the same number of human inputs, but it comes at a cost, right?
That technology, [00:18:00] um, is very expensive and it's not always the most reliable. And from a cyber security perspective. Uh, it lacks a lot of the robustness that you would expect in many other enterprise, uh, features and capabilities using a lot of open source, uh, legacy equipment that, uh, is vulnerable to cyber attack.
And we coupling that with, uh, instrumentation from drones. Most of those drones are produced overseas with cloud based solutions that take that imagery. And, you know, we don't have really good traceability as to how that data is being used, where it might be mined for malicious purposes, right? You hope it's not, but we don't have that level of confidence as an industry that we have everybody looking, looking out for the best interests of the farmer.
So as we go down this, this road right of a, of a farm, we're trying to expand from, [00:19:00] you know, one field to 50 to 100 fields. The technology, yes, is a great additive, a great multiplier. But now, just like when enterprises moved into e commerce or into cloud based computing, the speed of movement predated the speed of cybersecurity protection.
And it took the cyber security industry a while to catch up to virtualization, right? Uh, and then to cloud and then to containerization and now to artificial intelligence. We lag versus lead in many cases and that we see the same thing in the agricultural industry. Uh, and we've got a lot of work to do.
And the, uh, universities are leading in this space, unsurprisingly, right, the, the land grant universities, uh, starting to teach ag tech courses, which is great, uh, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, University of Kansas, all got good programs. And, uh, you know, we need [00:20:00] young people who, uh, may have.
Left the farm, uh, to go back. Right. You and I talked off camera about, uh, robotic milking machines and robotic. There is, uh, UC Davis out in California, right? Huge program around that. But are people thinking about the protection of those robotic equipment and what it would do to our nation's food supply if they were attacked?
We. Know what it looks like water supplies being attacked, right? And colonial pipeline for distribution of natural gas. So we have to concern ourselves with these things in the ag food supply. Otherwise, we might not have food in our grocery stores, right? So it's a big issue to be worked on.
Sean Martin: Yeah. And as, as I was thinking about the previous, uh, point that I was talking about, I was picturing the, the integration or the, yeah, the integration of, uh, physical risk [00:21:00] and technical risk.
Phillip Miller: Um,
Sean Martin: and. I don't know if some large organizations, those might be separate roles and farms. Maybe it's the same, right? I look at risk all the same for my farm and, and if something's going to impact it, that's how I mitigate it. But how, talk to me a bit about risk analysis, risk measurement, risk mitigation from a farming perspective.
Do you think there's a unique thing there that Potentially other CISOs might, might gain some insight from.
Phillip Miller: Well, I think farmers are the best at risk analysis of anybody. Uh, we, we are so used to having to plan around the weather and plan against supply chain disruptions and plan for the unplannable that we developed this level of resilience and adaptability.
And we do risk calculations in our head. Uh, [00:22:00] every day about, you know, uh, should we, uh, call the vet because this animal looks a little sick or do we wing it for another day? Right? Uh, because you're, you're balancing out those input costs, those output costs and see, so's. Uh, have a tendency to get built up into, I have to measure all risk or, um, I have to measure the risks that perhaps other people say, Oh, you know, these are the big things that we're worried about in our company and.
You actually need to lean into intuition a little bit more of how, again, back, back to what is your business doing? How's your business operating? What are your business fundamentals? Understand those and let them lead into your risk analysis, your risk prioritization, because if you try to calculate everything, you'll probably end up failing because it's just not enough time to do it.
And. Understanding what are those things? You know, in my book, I [00:23:00] talk about, you know, if you're a farmer, how do you want to measure risk, right? Think about those things that would be catastrophic business ending. Get those things out of the way first. And then think about those things that would be sort of the equivalent to, uh, a massive drought that could The kills an entire season's worth of crops, uh, worry about those things.
And if after you've done all of those, then sure, go, go a little deeper, but, uh, it's important to just really, really dive deep into. That that business modeling with your peers as a see. So understand what they're concerned about and then start leaning that into and blending it with what you know about the cybersecurity tech landscape that is delivering those results.
Because if you can do that, you're now focused on again, that, that, that delivery of whatever your company does, uh, to your customer. And if you can do that, right. Then you have a much [00:24:00] better outcome for your cybersecurity program and ultimately the business thrives more.
Sean Martin: So terms like, I'll list three.
Disaster recovery, business continuity, third management, third party risk management. Are those things that farmers look at, uh, formally as part of? Or, or is it all, is it more intuition? Uh, what I'm trying to figure out is do they have teams dedicated or people dedicated to those three things? And do they leverage teams and technology to manage those things?
Or, or is it more intuition based?
Phillip Miller: Yeah, it's a lot more intuition based in my book. Actually, I talk about, uh, One of the scenarios of a farm that has a catastrophic failure and their disaster recovery plan unfolds throughout the story as [00:25:00] they start going back to paper records and manual operations. Now, a lot of farms don't have detailed written disaster recovery procedures, but they have this, um, this knowledge bank, uh, usually built up over years of doing things that they can then go back to.
And I do think a lot of farms, even bigger farms could could leverage some of the discipline that come out of IT organizations. Business continuity planning, um, is important, but there are places where you'll find better parallels, uh, particularly around things such as, uh, managing biohazards, uh, anywhere where there's government regulations, right?
Where you have to keep a formal procedure book of how you're dealing with things. Uh, dairies are heavily regulated. And, uh, measurements of the quality of the milk, the temperature, all of those things, uh, will be present. And so they're more likely that a business that's got [00:26:00] robotic milking and those kinds of things would have formal procedures for business continuity, uh, particularly because if the milking machines fail, those cows still have to be milked.
And so you've got to know where you have redundancy, uh, and what can you do in the event of a failure. Supply chain risk, the third party risk management, I don't think has really got its way through the agricultural industry like it should. And we saw that right during the COVID 19 pandemic when, uh, the suppliers of livestock couldn't get processing time.
Uh, because the meatpacking plants were very constrained and what that did to the end consumer in the grocery stores and so some farmers started going direct to consumer and alleviating some of that bottleneck and quite a few farmers haven't gone back. Right? They've they've kept their on farm butchering.
Uh, processes and continue to, uh, sell direct to consumer some, some online, even, [00:27:00] uh, you know, we're obviously familiar with Omaha's X, but there's lots of smaller regional producers now, uh, selling direct to consumer.
Sean Martin: I love it. And let's, um, let's look at some of the advanced. technology. I can't get away from the two letter, uh, buzzword.
But there, there, there are things like drones and robotics. And I have to imagine that maybe I don't know if people look at data as an advanced technology, but the amount of data we have from our own farm, from other farms, co ops we work with. Government entities. Um, so how do those, we'll look at those three or three things plus data.
So, AI, robotics and drones, uh, underpinned with, with data. How, how do our farmers looking to embrace those in a. Hopefully in a safe way.
Phillip Miller: Yeah. I think for AI particularly, there's a lot of [00:28:00] promise for the farms. Um, we, we still have to make a lot of value based judgments about when to plant, when to harvest, and as the vast treasure trove of data.
Starts getting mined and put into AI models. It should enable us to do better than the tables of predictive data that we have from historical reports out of the, uh, the, the ag universities. Uh, similarly the, the data from drone footage, which, uh, can yield temperature based, uh, analytics and soil quality analytics.
We should be able to now start taking that data and applying it to more regional areas than has been possible in the past. And that has a ripple on effect to broader society, right? Water quality, the use of pesticides, herbicides on the farm, fertilizers, uh,
Sean Martin: Are they run off [00:29:00] into the streams?
Phillip Miller: Yeah, and if we can get more precise about that, right, this is the word you hear in ag, precision ag.
Okay. And if we can get more precise about that with the help of, of AI, then everybody benefits. Uh, the biggest benefit for the farmer is going to be lower costs. And, uh, I don't think a lot of people realize this, right? But, but farmers don't get paid a minimum wage. Uh, you are fully self employed and your income is realized when your commodity product is sold.
And so the, the better you can manage those input costs and optimize your harvesting, uh, cost of, uh, transporting your, your product to the grain elevator if you're a grain farmer, managing things like moisture content, all of those things are going to improve yields and do so with less effort. And so it's, it's, there's no one technology on its own that's going to get there for a farmer.
It's going to be [00:30:00] all of these things put in together, which is where you see companies like John Deere taking a real leadership approach. And they are offering both, you know, everything from the financing to the equipment, to seed, to, uh, you know, you know, Helping farmers get into this tech, uh, in, uh, incentivizing, I suppose, uh, companies who are innovating and say the drone market to, uh, do things with their data that can benefit the, the, the farmer in the tractor, uh, integrating with say Starlink so that a tractor.
Now has internet access, no matter where you are, right? While, while you're driving around the, all of those things are getting as closer to fully autonomous tractors. And once we get there, that opens up that possibility of that, that, that field you were talking about in the next county over, right? Uh, if a farmer can manage six [00:31:00] or seven autonomous harvesting machines, now we don't have to have teams of, you know, 50, 60 people.
Uh, you can run those harvesters seven by 24, uh, again, improving yields, reducing, uh, harvesting, hopefully reducing injuries on the farm too, uh, that would be a, a very, a very good public benefit if we can lower the, the health and safety outcomes.
Sean Martin: Yeah, back, back to the human, of course, I love that. And.
Let's, let's close with this. I'll close with the book, but, um, in terms of farm, cause you described the grain, so I had a scenario in my head of, and you talked about, uh, the moisture of zoom moisture in the grain, and you have to send it off to the, to the, I'll call it the dryer. It's probably the kiln. Um, So if you can get, the better you tune that, um, it saves money on, on the kiln, saves time in the process, perhaps [00:32:00] you're not over watering.
I presume that same as money on the watering. So in that scenario, I don't know if you want to elaborate on that a little bit more, but does the farming industry have the data? To make good decisions. Or are we in the infancy stage of that to where we need to kind of like cyber insurance, doesn't have a lot of data yet either.
So we're trying to figure out that, but do we have enough data in farming world to really see some impacts in the next few years, or do we have to collect a bunch more still?
Phillip Miller: I think we're still in the infancy because a lot of the data that's been collected is historical data and it's not very field specific.
So as the precision ag. Gets into, uh, more and more tractors, uh, and harvesters so that you can see not just, you know, yield per farm, but now perhaps even yield per row, moisture level per row, uh, you'll understand better, [00:33:00] uh, how you want to manage your watering, how you want to manage your fertilizing, and we'll be able to see year over year where those input costs yield new benefits.
And so, yeah, I think we're, we're just in the early stages of really understanding how this, uh, data plus AI, uh, which to me, uh, AI and farming needs to become real time. Uh, as I pull data from a sensor, it's got to be able to look across the broader, uh, landscape of things that are. Uh, happened on my specific farm and look at the predictive weather analytics for my specific field and then help me make a decision about what I'm going to do to better improve the, the, the viability, say, of a, of a row of corn or soybeans.
Sean Martin: It's super interesting and I can't help but think all the great data, all the advice and then, but then somebody has to act [00:34:00] on it still. That's right. So hopefully some of that's automated as well, but, um, but I go back to your intuition. If you, if you completely rely on the tech and the data and don't, Let's talk, talk real here.
Don't think about the cybersecurity implications. Data can be poisoned. Machine learning models can be poisoned, manipulated. Um, who knows what could happen? Nation states, uh, competitive farmers getting in and messing around with things. I want to go to, as we wrap up here, Philip, um, your book, it's called Hacking Success.
And so What was the, what was the driver for writing it? Who's it for? What do you expect them to get out of it?
Phillip Miller: Yeah. So the books for business owners and company officers and its focus again is on policy and how policy makes it harder for the hacker to have success. And so you, as the business owner are now hacking your [00:35:00] own success.
You're turning the tables on the adversaries so that your cybersecurity outcomes are more aligned with what you're looking for from a business perspective. Uh, and if it's okay, could I read a short excerpt for the book?
Sean Martin: Yes, absolutely, please do.
Phillip Miller: Facts are stubborn things, John Adams said in his summation of the defense of the British soldiers being tried for murder in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770.
Reason and facts must be the deterministic north by which executives set the course of their companies if they wish to protect against cybercrime by simultaneously adopting the latest technology, whether it's cloud computing. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, or something not yet imagined.
Guidance for business owners and decision makers routinely focuses on information and examples. An executive may emulate or derive benefit from them, but there is a finite ending to that [00:36:00] approach. A leader who invests their time into applying reason. And extending that philosophy to their teams will have an endless supply of winning outcomes.
A beneficial mental model for securing information in the age of artificial intelligence is not something to be purchased. It must be developed. It is for this reason that the company's most senior leaders hold accountability for establishing policy to create that outcome. And by extension, protecting what matters most to their enterprise to achieve a stable future.
You must allow yourself to be challenged to think critically about past choices and future options. A strong trait of leaders is the ability to excite our imagination with their vision. The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited. By the obvious realities, we need men who can dream of things that were never and ask [00:37:00] why not.
And that quotes from President John F. Kennedy. So that's a kind of a taste of, uh, of what you can expect in the book. And you know, the, there's a story in there of a farm who has a successive series of bad days and how policy business policy, not again, rules and regulations, uh, help helps them. Survive and overcome some of those challenges.
Sean Martin: It's all about, all about the operations and I love, I love, uh, imagination and vision. I think that's great. And then leaning into intuition, I think those are the couple, couple of points that I took from this conversation. Philip, great chatting with you. I wish you a tremendous success with the book, uh, high yields from the farm and, uh, continued, uh, paying it forward in the, in the, uh, Cybersecurity community as a CISO, wherever you might land next and whatever you, uh, whatever [00:38:00] challenges you take on in that realm.
Phillip Miller: Well, thanks, Sean. Yes, I look forward to whatever that next role might be. Who knows? Lots of interest in various different quarters, but nothing yet decided. But just like the farm, right? We plant seeds and we watch them grow. And that's what I do with my career too at the moment. So, uh, lots more story to be written, I think.
Sean Martin: Fantastic. Well, as the next chapter unfolds, you're welcome back anytime. Tell us more about what you're up to. And, of course, everybody listening, I appreciate you listening, and I hope you enjoyed it. Hope you can glean some things from, from Philip and his experience, uh, throughout his career and the insights from the farming world.
I'll put a link in to, uh, to grab the book. It's on pre order now. If I get this out, uh, before the 22nd of April, you can pre order it after that. Just fire away and order, order away. Um, so thanks everybody listening. Please do. Share, [00:39:00] subscribe, and, uh, comment if you have ideas or thoughts or questions. And Phillip and I certainly would be happy to, happy to comment back.
So, Phillip, thanks so much.
Phillip Miller: Alright, thanks, Sean. I appreciate it.
Sean Martin: Keep well, everybody.