Meat processing giant JBS says it has made significant progress in resolving a cyber attack that has seen thousands of the company's Australian employees stood down, including close to 300 at its Longford abattoir.
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JBS has had its operations in Australia, the United States and Canada affected by the ransomware attack, which occurred last weekend. The company believes the attack was carried out by a criminal organisation, likely based in Russia.
The Australian Meat Industry Employees Union says about 290 workers at the company's Longford plant had been stood down as a result of the attack and were concerned that they may not get paid for the week.
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JBS has more than 10,000 employees in Australia, with a network of 47 facilities across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.
In a statement released on Wednesday morning (AEST), JBS USA chief executive Andre Nogueira said the company's systems were coming back online and was making progress towards resuming plant operations in both the United States and Australia.
"We are not sparing any resources to fight this threat," he said. "We have cyber security plans in place to address these types of issues and we are successfully executing those plans."
"Given the progress our IT professionals and plant teams have made in the last 24 hours, the vast majority of our beef, pork, poultry and prepared foods plants will be operational tomorrow."
Mr Nogueira thanked the Australian government for its assistance over the last two days, saying the company had had daily calls with government officials "in an effort to safeguard the food supply".
JBS said the company wasn't aware of any evidence that any customer, supplier or employee data had been compromised in the cyber attack.
Given the progress our IT professionals and plant teams have made in the last 24 hours, the vast majority of our beef, pork, poultry and prepared foods plants will be operational tomorrow.
- Andre Nogueira, JBS USA chief executive
University of Tasmania lecturer and cyber security expert Joel Scanlan said that because JBS' back-up servers had not been hacked, it was unlikely it would need to pay any ransom because it could either wipe its hardware or buy new computers and restore its back-ups to them.
"As everything becomes digitised, things that we formerly didn't think of as being digitised are vulnerable and that means we need probably more action at all levels to focus on cyber security," Dr Scanlan said.
"And that's not just saying, 'The government let us down'. It's all sorts of things. It's governments putting in regulations around expectations on cyber security, it's businesses at all levels actually making sure that they've applied patches and are running recent operating systems and all that sort of stuff."
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