They manufacture and sell tractors, combines, foragers, hay tools, self-propelled sprayers, basically anything you would need to work on a farm. This industry has been under attack lately from many different aspects, not just cybercriminals. Still, it's been in the news that the food and processing industries are really under attack with various events. I'm not going to get into that today, but you can check that out in other places. But it's fascinating to me how the agriculture industry is dealing with many different external factors that are affecting their business.
I want to mention that business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans are essential for this very reason. It doesn't have to be a cyber-attack where you use these types of things, and it's critical in today's day and age that businesses look at what threats they have out there that could potentially bring down their business. While we make a lot of business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning around cyberattacks, companies still have to deal with the fires, the floods, the explosions, the plane crashes, and all these different things that might happen to your business. Cyber-attacks tend to be at the top of the list, but planning ahead of time is essential.
AGCO disclosed this ransomware attack, stating that the business operations will likely be adversely affected for several days and potentially longer to fully resume all services, depending upon how quickly the company can repair its systems. AGCO did not disclose who the attacker was if a ransom was demanded, whether it would wait, or whether the company had hired a third party, cyber security consultancy, or MSSP to assist with the investigation and recovery. They announced what happened at AGCO. They reported that they were dealing with this issue, and then they became very quickly tightlipped and aren't saying much more since the announcement.
The way we observe the public relations around cyberattacks highlights the maturity of incident response and incident response planning, having a solid PR strategy in place when dealing with incident response. It's very important. We're starting to see companies get better with this in the early days of ransomware, especially when the enormous ransom demands began. In the early days, the incident response was the wild, wild west out there for what businesses were doing and saying once they got hit with ransomware. Now we see things being more tightly controlled. Internal events are being talked about less. Less information is being spread through social media channels like Twitter and Reddit, where we used to see employees go when these types of cyberattacks happened.
Human beings are getting better at dealing with ransomware incident response, but we have to get better at defending against cyber attacks. That's what we do at Xact IT. We help companies with incident response, disaster planning, disaster recovery, and ransomware. We're here to help you.
For every business in the United States, prepare yourself, get ready. If you want to know how to do that, I have a book in the description that I will send you for free if you sign up for it. Just give us your information, and we'll get it out to you, and I'm not even going to be charging you for shipping. It's called Checkmate, and it's my newest book. Learn how to protect your business, avoid a cyber attack, prevent a cyber attack, and harden your defenses, so you don't get hit by a cyber-criminal.
But again, today, AGCO, a farm equipment manufacturer dealing with a ransomware attack, unfortunately. The agriculture business is out of commission. Learn from this. Let's start looking at what these businesses aren't doing, so you can start doing what's required to stop cybercriminals. You don't want to end up like them.
