World's largest meat company JBS hit by cyber attack

02-Jun-2021 - USA

A hacker attack on the world's largest meat company JBS from Brazil has paralysed large parts of production in North America and Australia. A White House spokeswoman said on Tuesday (local time) in Washington that JBS had informed the US government about the attack on Sunday.

Earlier, the Brazilian company, through its subsidiary JBS USA, said it had become the target of an organized cyberattack. The attack hit servers of its IT systems in North America and Australia, it said. It will take some time before the problems are resolved. JBS did not initially provide further details.

According to the US government, the hackers also demanded a ransom.

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JBS had informed the White House that the demand came from a criminal organisation - presumably Russia.

The government had already made it clear to Russia that a responsible state would not harbour perpetrators of such attacks.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is involved and investigating.

Because of the hacker attack, five of the largest meat factories in the US had to be shut down for the time being, as US media reported, citing unions and employees. In Canada, one of JBS's largest plants also had to suspend operations, according to the report. In Australia, the group's production was also severely restricted recently, according to the industry service Beef Central.

The holding company "J&F Investimentos", to which JBS belongs, employs more than 250,000 people and is represented in 190 countries.

Just a few weeks ago, a cyber attack on the largest gasoline pipeline in the U.S. temporarily cut fuel supplies in the country. The operator Colonial paid computer hackers a ransom of 4.4 million dollars (3.6 million euros), as the company admitted./hbr/mfa/DP/stk (dpa)

Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.

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