Posted on 06/10/2021 2:33:32 AM PDT by Libloather
JBS, the world’s biggest meat processor, has paid an $11m (£7.8m) ransom after a cyber attack shut down operations, including livestock slaughter plants in the US, Australia and Canada.
While most of its operations have been restored, the Brazilian headquartered company said it hoped the payment would head off any further complications including data theft.
JBS, which supplies more than a fifth of all beef in the US, reportedly made the payment in bitcoin.
“This was a very difficult decision to make for our company and for me personally,” said JBS’s chief executive, Andre Nogueira. “However, we felt this decision had to be made to prevent any potential risk for our customers.”
The meat producer was forced to stop all cattle slaughtering at its US plants for a day last week, in a move that threatened to disrupt food supply chains and lead to further food price inflation in the US, where labour shortages, high demand, and Covid-related disruptions are taking their toll.
The hack also disrupted the company’s operations in other countries, including Australia, but less severely.
JBS, which spends more than $200m (£141m) on IT and employs more than 850 tech specialists, said the FBI described the cybercriminal group that carried out the attack as “one of the most specialised and sophisticated” in the world. White House officials said last week the criminal organisation responsible was probably based in Russia.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
They weren’t doing this with Trump in office.
Just keep in mind the WEF will be doing their cyber polygon test soon.
Actually, they were. What gave ransomware attacks their big boost was the creation of bitcon (aka bitcoin).
"Then Bitcoin changed everything. While it had been under development for several years prior, it wasn’t until the end of 2012, when Bitcoin Foundation was formed and Bitcoin Central was recognized as a licensed European bank, that Bitcoin started to hit its stride as a viable form of currency."
"As it started to gain more mainstream appeal, ransomware criminals recognized it as just the method of monetary extraction they’d been seeking. Bitcoin exchanges provided adversaries the means of receiving instant payments while maintaining anonymity, all transacted outside the strictures of traditional financial institutions."
There is no excuse for this. Some IT controls and discipline within the organization is all that it takes to stop it. For example lockdown the ability for a user to start any unapproved “.exe” file. It is also a necessary move to segregate “process” and “business” systems from each other.
Never had this problem before the internet. There were large corporations, people got paid, things got shipped etc.
I think someone in AMERICA did this....someone like Bill Gates or someone who wanted people to BLAME “Russian Hackers” for HIGHER prices for gas and meat instead of blaming Biden Admin!!
We rely much too much on electronics on this planet. One good solar flare and huge EMP and it will all be fried.
Last time I look it didn’t take any electronics to raise butcher or sell meat animals.
Im not a luddite but we rely way too much on things that we have a tenuous hold on.
JBS, which spends more than $200m (£141m) on IT and employs more than 850 tech specialists...
—
None of whom apparently know the first thing about hardening their infrastructure against a ransomware attack. Apparently no offline backups and no secured admin access to servers.
Spot-on. It's a pain in the ass to do however whitelisting executable files works.
So does automatically sandboxing suspicious emails and blocking email from domains less than 90 days old.
And that's just for starters.
Logically isolate the user from the data center, micro-segmentation of the network, and locking down the user's workstation/laptop preventing any configuration changes including installation of any new unapproved software and you've got a good start on preventing ransomware from getting installed on your network.
There was some guy a while ago who talked about the ability for the US government to engage in cyber activity and make it look like it was the Russians.
Trying to remember the guy’s name...
Oh yeah - Edward Snowden.
PROVE ME WRONG!
It’s nothing to make a system attack-proof but nobody wants to pay up front. They deserve what they get.
I pay about $100 for anti-virus and anti-spyware programs.
I also back up my files automatically.
I wonder what if they let slip their subscriptions to these programs and forgot about backups?
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