The world's largest meat processing company is the latest high profile target of a sophisticated ransomware attack. The company, JBS, believe the attack originated from a Russian criminal group. The attack forced JBS to temporarily shut down operations in Australia, Canada and the US.
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said "JBS notified [the White House] that the ransom demand came from a criminal organisation likely based in Russia. The White House has offered assistance to JBS and our team at the Department of Agriculture have spoken to their leadership several times in the last day."
"The White House is engaging directly with the Russian government on this matter and delivering the message that responsible states do not harbour ransomware criminals," she added.
JBS said its backup servers weren’t affected by the attack and that it’s actively working with an incident-response firm to get its systems back online as soon as possible. The company is not aware of any evidence at this time that any customer, supplier or employee data has been compromised.
The attack comes only three weeks after the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack which left the US East Coast with a severely disrupted fuel supply and other recent attacks targeting hospitals and healthcare providers at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
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