When the Alarms Go Quiet
A Chicken Plant, A Chemical Attack, and the People Who Caught It
Let’s walk through this together, really take it in.
A former employee at a South Carolina chicken plant remotely accessed the facility’s systems and attempted to increase the levels of peracetic acid and sodium hydroxide, two chemicals used for sanitation. They also disabled the alarms that would have notified anyone that something was off.
That alone should shake you. But here’s the real kicker:
It wasn’t a firewall or a failsafe that caught it; it was a person.
Someone on the floor noticed something wasn’t right.
It’s the only reason this didn’t become a national recall… or worse, a public health crisis.
Now, pause.
Let’s put on our systems thinking hat, the one we only pretend we wear more often than we do.
How did we get here?
This wasn’t some foreign actor probing an oil pipeline.
This was someone who used to work there.
Someone who still had access.
Someone who likely clicked a few buttons from the comfort of their couch and tried to contaminate food being processed for public consumption.
If that doesn’t wake us up, I’m not sure what will.
Ask yourself:
Who owns remote access removal in your facility?
Who audits chemical dosing equipment?
Who watches the watchers?
Who’s responsible when it’s a former insider, not a hacker in a hoodie?
Because if your answer is “IT,” you’ve already missed the point.
📄 Want the original source? Here’s the article that sparked this whole conversation:
👉 South Carolina chicken plant sabotage case exposes food safety gaps via Food Safety News
In a world of dashboards and devices, it was an employee, flesh and blood, who caught it.
Let’s say that louder.
It wasn’t a tool. It wasn’t a patch. It wasn’t a vendor dashboard.
It was someone who paid attention. Someone who noticed something didn’t sit right.
Someone who still cared, even after a coworker tried to burn it all down.
We spend millions on tech, and yet our greatest detection system is still an engaged human being.
That’s not a vulnerability. That’s a gift.
So why are we leaving them out of the conversation?
Cyber-physical sabotage isn’t hypothetical anymore.
This was physical, digital, chemical, and very human.
It was:
A flaw in employee offboarding.
A failure in access management.
A near-miss with a food supply.
And a success story because someone gave a damn.
And yet, the headlines barely blinked.
We scream about breaches when someone leaks passwords.
But when someone tries to contaminate food, live in our systems?
Crickets.
Where’s the industry outrage?
Where are the tabletop exercises with cross-functional teams?
Where’s the retraining of food safety professionals to understand that cybersecurity isn’t an add-on, but a frontline defense?
Why aren’t the cybersecurity professionals including food defense in their GRC, DR, or BCP? Also, likewise for food protection?
Here's my challenge for you, and honestly, for me too:
We say employees are our biggest risk.
Maybe they’re actually our biggest asset; we just don’t treat them that way.
Are we giving them the knowledge to recognize sabotage?
Are we designing systems that allow them to question, interrupt, and report?
Are we building cultures where people feel safe to raise a flag instead of saying, “Well, that’s above my pay grade”?
Because I’ll tell you what, if one person on that floor hadn’t said something, we’d be having a very different conversation right now.
So let’s talk about it.
What does a resilient food system actually look like?
Who gets to be in the room when we talk about securing it?
And what do we owe the people working closest to the risk, who are often paid the least, trained the worst, and relied on the most?
Drop your thoughts. Share this post. Forward it to your food safety teams, your ops leaders, your CISO, your CEO, your mother-in-law, or whoever needs to hear it.
Because this wasn’t a fluke, it was a warning.
And next time? We might not get lucky.
Stay safe, stay curious,
Kristin King
