The world’s largest meat producer, JBS Foods, has had to shut down plants resulting from a recent ransomware attack. According to BleepingComputer, the incident impacted meat production in plants located in the United States, Australia, and Canada. The company also has locations in the United Kingdom and serves a wide variety of beef, pork, and poultry brands while employing nearly 300,000 people.

Consequently, Fox Business reports the cyber attack affected cattle futures on the stock market and has started raising concerns about how it could disrupt the global food supply, including resulting in food shortages, since one-fifth of U.S. beef production has been wiped out. While most meat plants in the United States are operating thanks to JBS’s back up servers, a Russian hacker group is suspected as being behind the cyber strike.

This latest cyber crime comes nearly a month after the Colonial Pipeline was shut down due to hackers and it goes to show nothing is safe from their attacks. However, many companies, and even the U.S. government, have been lax on updating their cyber security infrastructures and (in fairness) the hacks also expose flaws corporate and even government IT employees did not consider. No doubt PETA and other so-called animal rights groups are looking on with glee at this occurrence.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

UPDATE 06/02/2021: Good news! Most of JBS’s operations are back online and the hacker group behind the cyber attack has been identified.