JBS Cybercrime News begins to reopen meat plants that have been shut down by cyberattacks

JBS SA has begun at least partially opening up most idling beef plants in North America and Australia after a cyberattack forced the world’s largest meat producer to suspend operations.

The Brazilian food giant said on Tuesday night that it had made “significant progress” in resolving the attack and that it would have a “vast majority” of the plants up and running by Wednesday. It was being prepared for the regular production day for a second round at a facility in Greeley, Colorado, one of the largest beef plants in the U.S., with factories in Texas, Nebraska and Wisconsin partially underway, Facebook company messages said.

By Thursday, a plant in Oma will resume work in Pennsylvania, which will return to normal, union leaders said. JBS said production has resumed production at the Albanda Canadian Meat Facility, one of the largest in the country. Workers at the Longford meat processing plant in Australia have been told that operations will resume on Friday, according to a spokesman for the Meat Industry Workers’ Union in Tasmania Australasia.

Sunday’s cyberattack forced the closure of all U.S. beef plants — nearly a quarter of America’s supplies — and slow pig and bird production. Murder operations across Australia were suspended and at least one plant in Canada was shut down. JBS, which has facilities in 20 countries, owns Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the second-largest chicken producer in the U.S. You may never know the extent of the interruptions because the JBS did not determine the effect.

The attacks and subsequent shutdowns turned the agricultural market upside down and raised concerns about food security as hackers increasingly targeted critical infrastructure.

Chicago’s live cattle futures fell to 3.4% from a five-month low near Tuesday on Tuesday, before also bouncing 2.5% on Wednesday. Pig cuts fell 0.6% in Chicago, while profits fell from 2.9% on Friday.

“Our systems are back online and we are not saving any resources to deal with that threat,” US CEO JBS Andre Nogueira said in a statement Tuesday.

Fitch Ratings said Wednesday that it does not anticipate an immediate effect on JBS’s credit ratings for cyberattacks and sees the effects of future negative ratings on the attack as “very unlikely” if the company is able to return to normal operations in the short term.

Shares of JBS fell 1.1% in trading in Sao Paulo, gaining less than 1% of the Brazilian benchmark Ibovespa.

It is unclear what impact the final attack will have on meat prices. Vendors don’t always like to raise prices for consumers and can try to deal with it, according to economist Michael Nepveux of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “How long it will take will affect the level at which consumers start seeing something in grocery stores,” he said in a telephone interview.

Food buyers fear that the disruption to JBS will lead to difficult problems in the meat industry when prices are already high.

“It adds more fuel to the fire,” said Anne Hurtado, a buyer of Amigos Meat & Poultry in Chicago, fearing her JBS orders for this week. “We have seen a lot of inflation in the meat industry over the last month. There has been a lot of demand, exports have been high.”

Wholesale meat prices in the New York meat market have risen to 2% since Friday, said Kevin Lindgren, director of merchandise at Baldor Specialty Foods.

“It’s nothing wonderful yet,” Lindgren said, though he expects prices to be 10% higher in a week. “It will gradually get bigger as it tightens.”

The JBS attack is pushing for a system to re-ignite cheap American meat.

The sector is dominated by a number of titans – Tyson Foods Inc., JBS and Cargill Inc. – Those who control two-thirds of American meat. Throwing away some plants could also disrupt supply when Covid-19 outbreaks last year stopped plants and caused a shortage of meat across the country. The industry is so concentrated that JBS factories were not stationary, so on Tuesday the U.S. government prevented agricultural markets from releasing certain data on daily meat-based meat prices.

“Attacks like this highlight the weaknesses in the security of our nation’s food supply chain and underscore the importance of diversifying the country’s meat processing capacity,” said U.S. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate’s second most powerful Republican.

The JBS attack came three weeks after Colonial Pipeline Co., the largest gas station operator in the U.S., was accused of a ransomware attack attributed to a group called DarkSide. Experts say there is some evidence linking the group to Russia. This happened after some devastating hacking of U.S. government agencies, businesses, and health facilities, often blamed on Russia or Russian hackers in relations between countries in difficult times.

There is a famous hacking group linked to Russia behind the JBS attack, in which four well-known people in the campaign said they were not allowed to speak publicly on the subject. The Cybergang is called REvil or Sodinokibi.

Russia has no information about the cyberattack, but it has a diplomatic relationship with the U.S. government, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Issues related to cybercrime will be on the agenda on June 16 at a summit between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, he said.

More than 40 public ransomware attacks against food companies have been reported since May 2020, said Allan Liska, chief security architect at the cybersecurity analytics company Recorded Future.

“It’s frightening to see the number of hackers and cyberattacks reaching the U.S. and critical infrastructure,” Texas Republican Representative Kevin Brady said in a televised interview with David Westini Bloomberg, adding that businesses and the government must work together on such attacks. “We need to look at our entire supply chain in all critical parts of our economy and identify where these cyber vulnerabilities might be.”