Thousands of Australia’s meat workers left idle after massive cyberattack cripples JBS
- JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company with facilities around the globe, was hit with an ‘organised cybersecurity attack’ on Sunday
- The company informed the US government late on Tuesday that it had received a ransom demand from a criminal organisation likely based in Russia
Thousands of Australian meat workers had no work for a second day on Tuesday after a cyberattack crippled the world’s largest meat processing company. A government minister said it might be days before production resumes.
JBS USA said in a statement from Greeley, Colorado, on Monday that it was the target on Sunday of an “organised cybersecurity attack” affecting some of its servers supporting its North American and Australian IT systems.
“The company’s backup servers were not affected and it is actively working with an incident response firm to restore its systems as soon as possible,” the statement said.
Australian Agriculture Minister David Littleproud said the government and Australian Federal Police were working with JBS to resolve the problems and to pursue those responsible.
“Despite the fact that JBS accounts for around 20 per cent of our processing production here in Australia, we’re not expecting there to be significant impacts on exports so long as this isn’t a protracted shutdown,” Littleproud said on Tuesday.