Maple Leaf Foods – a major Canadian consumer packaged meats company based in Mississauga, ON – has revealed that it is suffering from a system outage resulting from a cybersecurity incident.
In a statement, the company said that it “took immediate action and engaged cybersecurity and recovery experts” when it learned of the incident. Maple Leaf Foods added that its team of IT professionals and third-party experts are “working diligently with all available resources to investigate the outage and resolve the situation.”
“The company is executing its business continuity plans as it works to restore the impacted systems; however, it expects that full resolution of the outage will take time and result in some operational and service disruptions,” the producer said in its statement.
But while it is recovering from the incident, the producer said that it will continue to work with its customers and suppliers to minimize disruptions.
A representative of the company reached out to IT World Canada to explain that the outage has led to several operational and service disruptions that vary by business unit, plant, and site.
“We will continue to work with all our customers and suppliers to minimize these disruptions as we work to do our best to continue delivering the nutritious food people need,” the representative said in an email statement.
“At this time, we are focused on restoring business continuity,” the statement continued. “We do expect some disruption in our operations and service levels as we work through the restoration process, but our team is deploying our business continuity plan and implementing workarounds to mitigate the impact on our operations and business.”
As a crucial part of any country’s critical infrastructure, the food sector is one of the biggest targets for hackers. Last year, the US subsidiary of Brazilian meat processing company JBS S.A. was forced to pay an US$11 million ransom to lift malware off its systems. JBS USA produces nearly a quarter of America’s beef supply.
