On 16 July, The Coca‑Cola Company announced that a dairy company it owns – fairlife, LLC – identified unauthorised access by a third party to a portion of its systems, including its production-related systems, in connection with a ransomware event.
According to an announcement published on the fairlife website, after detecting the issue, the company swiftly activated its incident response and business continuity protocols.
The company is continuing to investigate the incident’s impact with external advisors and cybersecurity experts, and has notified law enforcement.
Whilst the full impacts of the incident are not yet known, product quality and safety have not been impacted.
As a result of the incident, production operations at fairlife in the US have reportedly been temporarily suspended, but its Canada production operations are not currently impacted.
Multiple attacks on F&B sector
Rebecca Moody, Head of Data Research, Comparitech commented: “Manufacturers remain one of the most targeted industries for ransomware attacks because of the sheer amount of disruption the encryption of systems can cause.
“So far this year, we’ve noted 181 attacks on the food and beverage sector and 109 of these have been on manufacturers.
“We don’t yet know which gang is behind this attack on fairlife, but if ransom negotiations fail and/or data has been stolen in the attack, it’s likely we’ll find out in the coming days/weeks.
“Food and beverage manufacturers have been a favourite of The Gentlemen and Qilin this year. The Gentlemen was behind the crippling attack on Mackay Sugar in Australia last month.”
