Look at the news knews
2021-06-03 13:52
On Wednesday, June 2, local time, most of the meat factories of meat giant JBS in the Americas and Australia have been shut down for several days due to cyber attacks. Meanwhile, JBS Brazil headquarters said it had made "significant progress" in handling the accident and expected the vast majority of plants to reopen later on Wednesday.
JBS is reportedly the second largest producer of beef, pork and chicken in the United States. Trey Malone, an assistant professor of agriculture at Michigan State University, said that if the JBS plant were to close for a day, the nation would lose nearly a quarter of its beef processing capacity, which is equivalent to 20,000 beef cattle.
Joan Ruskamp, a feedlot operator in Nebraska, told the media that consumers will soon feel the effects of the cyberattack. "The JBS factory in Grand Island, Nebraska alone can handle 5,000 cattle a day," she says.
The widespread shutdown caused by the cyberattack shows that modern meatpacking plants have become highly automated for food and worker safety reasons – computers collect data at multiple stages of meat production, in addition to orders, bookkeeping, shipments and other processes that are also electronically operated.
While automation is both convenient and efficient, this trend also introduces new security risks. On Wednesday, Christopher Krebs, the former head of cybersecurity in the United States, called on business executives and heads of state and local government agencies to ask themselves: How do they recover from the hack?
"Obviously, every company has to improve their security, but most importantly, they have to improve their plans for business disruption," Krebs warned, "hackers first targeted our gasoline and now targeted our hot dogs, and no industry is immune." ”
According to foreign media reports, this cyber attack on the food industry is not the first case. Last November, Milan-based beverage company Campari Group said it had suffered a ransomware attack. The incident resulted in a brief technical outage and involved some business and personal data.
In March, Molson Coors, a multinational beverage and brewing company in Chicago, also suffered a cyberattack, affecting its production and transportation. The company said it was able to resume operations at some breweries after 24 hours, but others would take days.
(Look at the news knews reporter: Ren Meixing Editor: Pan Yi)