Recently, major corporations in the United States have been under attack from hacker groups. First it was the Colonial Pipeline company which gave us a shortage on gas, and now it is another cyber attack on JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier. Soon there may be shortages of meat in North America and Australia. The company provides about 20% of our meat in multiple countries across the world.
Officials at JBS say it will take some time to resolve the error and cancel shipments and payments to stores across the world. Sadly many people are also losing their jobs because of the hack. It is suspected that the recent two hacks on major companies that provide necessary resources are connected in some way. It may be that Russia authorized both of them or that the same hacker group did the grunt work for both attacks.
The good news is that the hack did not affect places like South America. In Brazil, a representative in Sao Paulo stated that their meat supplies will not be affected by the recent hack and that there should be no shortage of meat to them.
The attack was a ransomware attack meaning that it was a type of malware that threatens to leak data or limit access of something of a person to them. In this case it took control of a part of the supply chain at JBS and held it hostage so it was unusable. Right now the FBI is investigating the incident and is informing other companies with similar production methods to be aware of the situation and to be more cautious in the future when it comes to their data.
Many companies are heading this advice, so hopefully these attacks will become less frequent. It is almost impossible to completely solve a problem like this because we are always finding work-arounds for problems, but in turn there is always more that we can do to keep our important data and resources safe. Some extreme things would be paying people to put in more security checks or new firewalls, but something you could do to protect your data is to block spam callers and ignore any emails from people you don’t know or at least do more research about the company or people that are looking for your information.
