One of Canada’s biggest producers of packed meat products, Maple Leaf Foods, stated the company was experiencing a system outage following a cybersecurity incident. According to a statement released by the company, “Upon learning of the incident, Maple Leaf Foods took immediate action and engaged cybersecurity and recovery experts. Its team of information systems professionals and third-party experts are working diligently with all available resources to investigate the outage and resolve the situation.”
It continued, “The Company is executing its business continuity plans as it works to restore the impacted systems; however, it expects that full resolution of the outage will take time and result in some operational and service disruptions. The Company will continue to work with all its customers and suppliers to minimize these disruptions in order to continue delivering the nutritious food people need.”
A spokesperson for Maple Leaf Foods noted that the system outage is having an impact on the company’s operations and service levels. While also noting that the disruptions were affecting different areas of the company.
“At this time, we are focused on restoring business continuity. We do expect some disruption in our operations and service levels as we work through the restoration process, but our team is deploying our business continuity plan and implementing workarounds to mitigate the impact on our operations and business,” a spokesperson told IT World Canada.
There has been a spurt of cyber-attacks targeted against the food sector, even though the industry is considered a critical infrastructure.
One of the biggest victims of a ransomware attack was JBS, the world’s largest meat processor. Only after paying a ransom of around $11 million, JBS was able to successfully end the ransomware attack that had affected its operations in various countries. The attack had temporarily shut down its operations in the US, Canada, and Australia. This was a very difficult decision to make for our company and for me personally,” said JBS chief executive Andre Nogueira said post the incident, that occurred last year.
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