Summary
- ANSSI has released a cyber crisis exercise kit for France’s agri-food sector.
- The kit includes sector specific scenarios across three levels of complexity and supporting materials for table-top and simulation exercises.
- Food supply is increasingly being treated as operational resilience infrastructure exposed to cyber disruption.
France’s national cyber agency has released a cyber crisis exercise kit for the agri-food sector, giving one of the country’s essential supply ecosystems a structured way to rehearse cyber disruption before a real incident tests production, distribution, and continuity planning.
ANSSI said organisations and companies need to prepare and react quickly to cyberattacks to maintain continuity of activity, while anticipation and preparation still too often fall short. The agency’s new agri-food kit gives sector entities a ready-made basis for cyber crisis exercises, with scenarios designed around the specific pressures of food production and supply.
The kit is built around three levels of complexity so it can be used by organisations with different levels of cyber crisis maturity. ANSSI describes it as a set of documents that can be adapted to each organisation’s internal structure, missions, tools, and operating context. The materials include facilitator and player briefings, chronograms, observation grids, debriefing templates, participant directories, and post-exercise questionnaires across table-top and simulation formats.
Food supply is often discussed through logistics, safety, and availability, but its cyber dependency is less visible until disruption occurs. Producers, processors, distributors, retailers, cold chain operators, packaging suppliers, and agricultural technology providers rely on industrial control systems, enterprise resource planning platforms, remote access, warehouse systems, logistics data, quality controls, and supplier connectivity. A cyber incident does not need to target food supply directly to affect it. Ransomware at a supplier, identity compromise in a logistics partner, or malware in an industrial environment can produce operational consequences that differ sharply from a conventional data breach.
ANSSI notes that organisations can be victims of cyberattacks without being the intended target. That is particularly relevant for a sector built around interdependence. Production sites often operate to tight margins and strict timing, while distribution windows, perishability, food safety requirements, regulatory records, and dependency on external transport or packaging suppliers can turn a contained IT incident into a wider operational problem.
The exercise-kit approach gives organisations practical material rather than another general warning. Many companies understand the need to run cyber crisis exercises but lack internal resources to design credible scenarios, organise participants, and capture lessons. Sector material lowers that barrier and reduces the tendency to rehearse only technical response while leaving executive decision-making, customer communication, supplier coordination, and operational workarounds underdeveloped.
The three-level structure reflects uneven maturity across the agri-food ecosystem. Large multinational food groups may already run cyber exercises, maintain security operations functions, and test recovery plans. Smaller producers and regional suppliers may operate with lean IT teams, outsourced support, ageing operational technology, and limited experience of structured crisis management. A national kit allows organisations to start from a common scenario base while adapting the exercise to their scale and exposure.
The regulatory environment is also changing. NIS2 expands Europe’s view of essential and important entities, and national authorities are increasingly looking at sector resilience rather than only individual company security. Even where an agri-food organisation is not directly supervised under the strictest cyber rules, it may face contractual demands from customers, insurers, banks, public-sector buyers, or larger supply chain partners seeking evidence of incident preparation.
Cyber crisis rehearsal tests whether resilience language has become operational capability. Exercises expose gaps that policy documents can hide, including unclear authority, missing contact lists, weak supplier escalation paths, inaccessible backups, legal uncertainty, poor evidence capture, and unrealistic recovery-time assumptions. In food supply, those gaps can affect physical operations, delivery commitments, product integrity, and public confidence.
ANSSI’s kit gives the sector a structured way to discover those weaknesses under controlled conditions. A cyber crisis in the agri-food sector would not wait for governance arrangements to become tidy, and rehearsed decision-making is likely to determine whether disruption remains contained or reaches production, logistics, and customers.
