In intensive poultry, biosecurity is an information system. Flock registers, house climate histories, feed batch and medication records and veterinary sign-off are what prove disease control held - and what makes a withdrawal executable when it does not. Ad-Dilam's producers and feed mills run all of it digitally, alongside climate control a house depends on within minutes. CyberFortify runs manual network, cloud and API testing plus passive control-boundary review here, aligned to NCA ECC and OTCC and the Saudi PDPL. Fixed price, free remediation retest.
// 01 Why Ad-Dilam producers need penetration testing
Ask a poultry manager what keeps a flock healthy and you get an answer about paperwork before one about medicine. Biosecurity is a discipline of documentation and controlled environments: which birds are in which house, what feed batch they received, which medications were given and when the withdrawal period expires, who entered which biosecurity zone, and what the house held for temperature, humidity and air exchange every hour of the cycle. In Ad-Dilam, where poultry sheds, feed mills and livestock units send product north into Riyadh daily, all of that now lives on production software, sensor historians and controller networks. The register is a database. The withdrawal period is a date field. Biosecurity has become a data-integrity problem wearing agricultural clothes.
Two failure modes matter more than the rest. The first is availability at the house: ventilation is not a comfort system, and a house that loses air exchange is in trouble in minutes - so anything that can reach that control layer, including a flat network shared with the office, is a welfare emergency waiting for a trigger. The second is integrity in the records: if feed batch links, medication entries or consignment records can be altered or silently detached, a producer facing a contaminated lot cannot say which houses ate it or which loads left the gate, and a withdrawal that should be surgical becomes a guess. An automated scan speaks to neither. It reports a missing patch; it cannot tell you whether an intruder on the office estate could reach a fan controller, or whether a batch record can be rewritten without leaving a trace. Manual testing can, and that is what we scope here.
// 02 Compliance and regulatory drivers in Ad-Dilam
Obligations here follow the control systems, the food-supply role and the traceability an operation must be able to demonstrate. These are the requirements we most often map evidence against locally.
NCA OTCC - house & mill automation
House climate control, ventilation, feeding lines and mill process control sit inside the national Operational Technology baseline: segmentation from the business network, hardened remote access and technical assurance.
NCA ECC & food-security supply
Producers contributing to national poultry and protein supply, and those contracting with government bodies, fall under the Essential Cybersecurity Controls and their requirement for periodic vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.
Batch records & withdrawal capability
A withdrawal is only as accurate as the link between feed batch, house, flock and consignment. We test whether those links can be altered or severed, whether edits are attributable, and whether the chain survives in backups.
Climate control as an availability control
Ventilation availability is an animal-welfare control, not an IT convenience. We assess what could reach it, whether alarm paths could be suppressed, and whether failure modes are genuinely fail-safe - by review, never by interference.
Saudi PDPL
Producers and mills hold employee, contractor, driver and customer records, and must apply appropriate technical measures under the Personal Data Protection Law - including over the systems that hold veterinary and workforce data together.
// 03 Penetration testing services for Ad-Dilam
Engagements start at the boundary between the office estate and house or mill control, then move to the systems holding the records. Integrated poultry prioritises segmentation and production software; feed mills lead with process-network review and supplier integrations.
Network pen testing
External perimeter, internal and segmentation testing between business systems and house climate control, feeding lines and mill process networks.
Web application pen testing
Manual OWASP Top 10 testing of flock, feed batch and traceability applications - with emphasis on authorisation and record-integrity flaws.
Cloud pen testing
Configuration-aware testing of the cloud production, monitoring and ERP platforms holding flock registers and batch history.
API pen testing
Testing of hatchery, feed supplier, veterinary and processor integrations - broken object-level authorisation and interfaces that can write further than intended.
Mobile app pen testing
iOS and Android testing of the house-walk, mortality and medication apps stockpersons use inside biosecurity zones.
Red teaming
Goal-based simulation of the scenario that matters most: reaching the record layer, or the control boundary, without being detected.
// 04 How we deliver to Ad-Dilam
CyberFortify has no office in Saudi Arabia. We deliver to Ad-Dilam remotely from our Gulf base, on your clock - Arabia Standard Time, UTC+3 - with on-site work planned around biosecurity zone rules rather than against them.
What runs remotely
External perimeter, web, cloud, API and internal network testing from our secure environment during your business hours, scheduled around placement, depletion and delivery peaks, with no travel in the quote.
What we do on-site
Wireless survey, segmentation validation and passive control-boundary review at the farm or mill, arranged as one planned visit respecting site entry and biosecurity zone rules.
Every engagement opens with a free 30-minute scoping call, followed by a fixed-price quote within the hour and a free remediation retest once fixes ship.
// 05 Industries we secure in Ad-Dilam
The town's economy is intensive protein and feed production for the capital. CyberFortify tests across the sectors that define its risk profile:
// 06 Our methodology
Engagements follow the same audit-defensible process CyberFortify runs worldwide, adapted for environments where living animals depend on continuous control. IT testing is grounded in the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) and NIST SP 800-115, with exploitation mapped to the relevant MITRE ATT&CK tactics, including ATT&CK for ICS; control-system work follows the IEC 62443 zone-and-conduit model and is strictly non-disruptive. As a CREST Accreditation Pathway firm we lead with manual testing, and we never direct automated tooling or active exploitation at live climate, ventilation or feeding control.
Scoping & operational agreement
Targets, house and mill control boundaries, record systems, prohibited techniques, biosecurity zone constraints and escalation paths agreed in writing before testing begins.
Fixed quote in 1hReconnaissance & threat modelling
Attack surface mapped around two objectives an attacker would hold: reaching climate control, and rewriting batch or medication records without attribution.
ATT&CK for ICSControlled exploitation
Active testing on IT, management and non-production systems; the OT side reviewed passively through architecture, configuration and captured traffic. Welfare is never put at risk.
Passive on OTReporting & free retest
Executive summary, CVSS-scored findings and NCA ECC and OTCC mapping, written for production managers as well as IT - plus a free retest once fixes ship.
Audit-ready// 07 Why CyberFortify for Ad-Dilam
A vendor that treats a farm like an office
A firm that scans the corporate estate, calls the result a pen test, and never asks whether the same network reaches a ventilation controller or whether a feed batch record can be edited without a trace.
CyberFortify in the Gulf
A Gulf-based, CREST-pathway team in your time zone that reads biosecurity as an information system: record integrity, traceability and withdrawal capability tested seriously, control-boundary exposure assessed safely, findings mapped to NCA OTCC and ECC, fixed pricing and a free remediation retest.
Engagements here commonly pair segmentation and network testing with application testing of the production and traceability software your withdrawal capability depends on.
// 08 Frequently asked questions
Why treat biosecurity as a cybersecurity problem?
Because biosecurity is enforced through records and controlled environments, and both are now digital. The flock register, the feed batch log, the medication record with its withdrawal period, the veterinary sign-off and the house climate history are the evidence that biosecurity was actually maintained. If those records can be altered, or the climate control that keeps a house within its envelope can be reached, the biosecurity programme is only as strong as the systems holding it together.
Will you test our poultry house ventilation and climate control?
Not actively, and this is not negotiable. A poultry house depends on ventilation within minutes, not hours, so we never send traffic at live climate or ventilation control and never attempt to influence a setpoint, alarm or fan stage. On the OT side we work passively - architecture review, configuration and firmware review, segmentation analysis and captured traffic. Active exploitation happens on the IT and management estate and on non-production systems only. Animal welfare is never put at risk to produce a finding.
What does a batch traceability attack actually look like?
It looks like quiet edits rather than an outage. Feed batch identifiers get reassigned, a medication entry loses its withdrawal date, or the link between a delivered feed lot and the houses that received it is broken. Nothing appears wrong until a withdrawal is required, at which point the operator cannot say precisely which flocks and which consignments are affected. We test whether records can be changed without attribution, whether audit trails survive administrative access, and whether backups would let you reconstruct the chain.
Which regulations apply to penetration testing in Ad-Dilam?
House climate control, feed mill automation and their supporting networks fall within the scope of the NCA Operational Technology Cybersecurity Controls; producers supplying national food production and those contracting with government bodies fall under the NCA Essential Cybersecurity Controls, which require periodic vulnerability assessment and penetration testing; employee, contractor and customer records fall under the Saudi PDPL. Groups certified to ISO 27001:2022 use control A.8.29 to require security testing during development and before change.
How fast can we get a quote for an Ad-Dilam engagement?
After a free 30-minute scoping call - which for a poultry or feed operation covers your house control architecture, your production and traceability systems and any biosecurity zone restrictions on site access - we return a fixed-price quote, usually within one hour and always within one business day. Every engagement includes a free remediation retest once fixes ship.