Pierluigi Paganini
June 14, 2020
Systems at Australian beverages company Lion were infected with a ransomware, the security breach caused the disruption of manufacturing processes and customer service.
Lion is a beverage and food company that operates in Australia and New Zealand, and a subsidiary of Japanese beverage giant Kirin. It produces and markets a range of beer, wine, cider, RTDs and spirits, as well as dairy and other beverages
The infection took place on June 9, and a few days later the company confirmed that the incident was caused by ransomware.
The cyberattack will cause a delay in the production of beer, the company announced.
In response to the attack, the Australian company shut down some manufacturing sites, and some of them have yet to be resumed. The company also started informing customers about the incident and warned of possible “temporary shortages.”
“Our investigations to date have shown that a system outage has been caused by ransomware. The ransomware targeted our computer systems. In response, we immediately shut down key systems as a precaution.” reads a post published by the company on its website.
“Our teams are working as hard as they can to service customers and suppliers, implementing new manual processes and investigating all alternative options. We recognise this is imperfect and is causing disruption to our valued partners. We also recognise this is happening at an unfortunate time as we emerge from COVID-19 restrictions,”
Lion immediately launched an investigation into the ransomware attack, it confirmed that financial or personal information has not been exposed as a result of the attack.
“We had been hoping to have full access restored by now, but unfortunately this process is taking longer than we hoped,” continues the post.”There is no evidence that any of the information contained in our system (including financial or personal information) has been affected but this is something that we will review closely as we continue to investigate the incident.”
Recently other Australian companies were hit by a cyber attack, the shipping giant Toll suffered two ransomware attacks in a few months.
In May, the Australian flat product steel producer BlueScope Steel Limited was also hit by a cyberattack that caused disruptions to some of its operations.
Ransomware attacks are threatening production plants worldwide, recently Japanese carmaker Honda announced it has been hit by a cyberattack that disrupted its business in several countries.
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(SecurityAffairs – Lion, ransomware)
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