Monsanto confirms data breach, emphasizes limited scope

Agricultural and biotech giant Monsanto acknowledged last week that its Precision Planting business unit experienced a data breach, exposing some employee and customer information to an unknown intruder.

“Unauthorized access occurred on a Precision Planting server that stored employee information and customer account information, including some credit card information, and tax ID numbers,” said Christy Toedebusch, spokesperson for Monsanto, in an email to Advisen. “The incident didn’t impact the farming data collected by Precision Planting equipment (like yield data), as that is stored on a separate system.”

Toedebusch said she didn’t think the hackers were attempting to steal customer data, but notifications were warranted because information was exposed. She went on to note that the breach seems to be limited to the one Tremont-Ill.-based company and did not affect the rest of the Monsanto organization or customers in any other line of business.

“Fewer than 1,300 farmer customers of Precision Planting were impacted,” said Toedebusch. “To provide a comparison point, there are more than 15,000 farmers who own a Seed Sense 20/20 (the seed planting monitor that is one of the many products Precision Planting sells).  I don’t know their total farmer customer base number, but I know it is in the tens of thousands when you look across the scope of their product line.”

Monsanto has offered free credit monitoring to all customers on the affected data server, she added. The investigation is ongoing, Toedebusch said, noting that she couldn’t comment on the source of the attack, just that it was an “outside party.”

“We value the privacy of customer information and have systems in place to protect that privacy,” stated Toedebusch in an email. “We are working to increase our security safeguards on the impacted server and are reviewing the security on other servers in an effort to prevent further incidents.  While no system can be completely secure, we believe our new security protocols will provide significant protection for customer data.

Monsanto, as a giant in the field of genetically modified food sources, has drawn international opposition and numerous hacking attempts. Hackivist group “Anonymous” has claimed responsibility for several cyber-attacks against the corporation, including one that briefly downed Monsanto’s website in a denial-of-service (DOS) effort in  May 2013.