The world’s largest meat producer had to shut down operations in the USA and Australia for several days after a cyberattack at the weekend.
JBS Foods operates in 190 countries with 245,000 employees. According to a company statement:
On Sunday, May 30, JBS USA determined that it was the target of an organized cybersecurity attack, affecting some of the servers supporting its North American and Australian IT systems.
According to the Whitehouse Press Secretary, the company had received a ransom demand from a criminal gang thought to be operating out of Russia.
Coming just three weeks after the cyber-attack against the largest petrol pipeline in the US, this attack highlights the fragility of many of the world’s critical supply lines for commodities.
Operations at JBS started to re-open a few days after the attack, an impressively short time – indicating perhaps that they had a well-designed and tested Security Incident Response Plan allowing the firm’s IT team to act swiftly and call in incident response experts to help contain and mitigate the attack.
“We were very impressed with the service, I will say, the vulnerability found was one our previous organisation had not picked up, which does make you wonder if anything else was missed.”
Aim Ltd Chief Technology Officer (CTO)