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United States-based food processing company JBS USA has confirmed falling victim to a cyber attack, with the aftermath affecting its North American and Australian systems.
“On Sunday, May 30, JBS USA determined that it was the target of an organised cybersecurity attack, affecting some of the servers supporting its North American and Australian IT systems,” it said in a statement.
“The company took immediate action, suspending all affected systems, notifying authorities, and activating the company’s global network of IT professionals and third-party experts to resolve the situation.”
JBS said its backup servers were not affected, and that it was actively working with an incident response firm to restore its systems “as soon as possible”.
It also said it is currently not aware of any evidence to suggest customer, supplier, or employee data has been compromised or misused as a result of the attack.
“Resolution of the incident will take time, which may delay certain transactions with customers and suppliers,” it added.
Need to disclose a breach? Read this: Notifiable Data Breaches scheme: Getting ready to disclose a data breach in Australia
Over in New Zealand, Waikato District Health Board (DHB) has issued an update to the ransomware attack it suffered two weeks ago.
Waikato DHB on May 18 experienced a full outage of its information services. On Monday, the organisation said progress was being made to restore its IT systems and that the focus was to move towards a recovery phase to “progressively stand up services”.
It said clinical services across all departments and hospitals ran relatively smoothly over the weekend, but reiterated that emergency departments at all the DHB hospitals in Waikato, Tokoroa, Te Kuiti, Taumarunui, and Thames should be kept for emergencies only.
Work on IT systems, Waikato DHB said, is continuing in “priority areas for restoration” across radiation therapy, lab systems, radiology for imaging, result viewer, and IPM, which is the organisation’s patient management system.
“There is a recovery process needed before these are functioning services,” it said.
“We continue to work with legal experts and the Privacy Commissioner as the investigation is ongoing. A number of individuals were identified last week and the majority have now been contacted.”
