What can actually go wrong in that digitalised cheese dairy if its cyber security architecture is poor?

Everything from a plant standing still to stolen recipes, a manipulated cold chain and dead animals — and note that only some of it is about data at all.

* The damage is not only data: stopped production, spoiled stock and dead animals are the losses no backup restores. *

Mapped onto the business areas:

• Production: ransomware halts the plant — total production outage. The recipe database is stolen, taking with it the one asset the company's market position is built on.
• Animals and pasture: a ransomware attack reaching the milking robots, with animals dying as a consequence; GPS trackers failing and animals being lost.
• Supply chain: the supplier connection is disrupted, raw materials do not arrive, and production stops for want of milk rather than for want of computers.
• Administration: data theft in the back end.
• Logistics and storage: stock figures manipulated — delivery failures on one side, overproduction on the other. Warehouse temperature manipulated, and the stored cheese becomes unusable.
• Sales: the website is hacked and customer data is stolen — with the regulatory and reputational tail that follows.

Two things make this a better teaching case than a bank or a hospital:

1. It defeats the "we are not a target" reflex. The dairy has no state secrets and no card data. It is attacked anyway, because ransomware does not select by industry — it selects by reachability, and a company that has digitalised without securing is reachable.
2. The damage is physical and irreversible. A stolen database can be notified and, painfully, moved past. Spoiled cheese, lost animals and a stopped production line are losses that no backup restores — which is precisely what changes when OT and IoT are in scope rather than only IT.

Go deeper:

• Wikipedia — Ransomware — how targets are actually chosen, which is what defeats the "we are not interesting" reflex.