Cyberattack causes delays for South Africa’s largest chicken producer

South Africa’s largest chicken producer lost more than $1 million due to a recent cyberattack that caused delivery delays and other issues. 

Astral Foods told investors on Monday that it suffered a cyberattack on March 16 that required the company to implement all of its disaster recovery protocols and preparedness plans.

The company controls multiple chicken businesses that produce and sell chickens and eggs, as well as manufacture animal feed and other products. 

The cyberattack caused “downtime in processing and deliveries to customers” that resulted in lost revenue and backlogs. In total, Astral Foods said it lost about 20 million rand worth of profits, which is about $1 million. 

“At the date of this announcement, all business units are operating normally following the recovery of our systems,” the company said. “Astral can confirm that no confidential information or sensitive data of customers, suppliers or individual stakeholders was compromised as a result of the cyber intrusion.”

The company warned investors that the week-long outages caused by the cyberattack would trigger significant decreases in the earnings per share for the current six month financial period ending next week. In September, the company reported more than $1 billion in annual revenue for 2024.

Astral Foods did not respond to requests for comment about the type of attack it dealt with or who was behind it. No ransomware gang has taken credit for the incident as of Monday. 

Large agricultural institutions have been a frequent target for ransomware gangs, because many organizations will pay ransoms to avoid potential disruptions to food distribution. 

The Food and Agriculture-Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Food and Ag-ISAC) said last year that there were at least 167 ransomware attacks on the sector throughout 2023. 

Large food producers like JBS, Dole, Sysco and Mondelez have all experienced ransomware attacks over the last five years and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) told Recorded Future News in 2023 that it was affected by a ransomware group’s exploitation of a popular file transfer tool, exposing troves of industry information. 

At least one farm lost $9 million due to a ransomware attack in 2021 and dozens of companies have been impacted by incidents.