Pierluigi Paganini
March 25, 2025
Astral Foods is a South African integrated poultry producer and one of the country’s largest food companies. It specializes in poultry production, animal feed, and related agricultural operations. The company supplies chicken products to retail, wholesale, and fast-food markets in South Africa and neighboring countries. Astral reported over $1 billion in annual revenue for 2024.
The company announced more than $1 million in losses (20 million rand) due to a March cyberattack that impacted delivery and other operations. Astral Foods quickly responded to the incident, implementing all disaster recovery protocols and preparedness plans. The company confirmed no sensitive data was compromised in the attack.
“On 16 March 2025, Astral experienced a cybersecurity incident. The Group acted swiftly, implementing all disaster recovery protocols and preparedness plans. However, our Poultry Division was negatively impacted by downtime in processing and deliveries to customers. This resulted in a loss of revenue, and together with costs to catch-up a backlog in production, have impacted the Group’s profits in this reporting period by approximately R20 million.” reads a statement published by the company. “At the date of this announcement, all business units are operating normally following the recovery of our systems.”
Astral warned investors that the cyberattack-related outages would significantly reduce earnings per share for the current financial period.
At this time, no ransomware gang has taken credit for the cyber attack.
Major food producers like Dole, JBS, Sysco, and Mondelez have faced ransomware attacks, with some incidents causing multimillion-dollar losses.
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