US Temperature-controlled warehousing & transportation company – Americold Realty Trust, Inc. has announced that they have been subject to a cyber attack.
The Atlanta-based company which has over 245 temperature-controlled warehouses and manages over 1 billion cubic feet of storage worldwide announced on Friday (28/04/23) that they had been experiencing IT issues since their network was breached on Tuesday evening.
In their statement sent to customers, the company said that:
“Americold is continuing to assess the intrusion that occurred Tues night / Wed morning. We contained the intrusion and shut down our network to ensure there is no risk to non-contained areas or customers. We are still in the discovery process on the path to rebuild the impacted systems. At this moment, we are anticipating a scenario to be brought back up by mid-next week. As we continue to work to understand the level at which data will be recovered, we will be able adjust our anticipated timeline for restart and will provide updates accordingly.”
Reports on Reddit suggest that their global operations is down, with multiple drivers and clients struggling to get any other information from the company.
No deliveries
Americold has asked all customers to cancel all “inbound” deliveries past next week and to reschedule all but the most critical “outbounds” which are reaching expiration dates.
So far, no data has been posted on the main dark-web sites from any of the usual suspects (LockBit, Black Basta, etc.) so time will tell if anything dose appear.
Not the 1st time
This attack on Americold will bring back some nightmares for their security teams as well as the executives as this is the 2nd time in 3 years the company has been hit.
Back in November 2020, Americold was targetted with a ransomware attack which shut the company down completely for 3 days and a further 2 weeks to fully recover.
That cyber-attack was recorded in a Form 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, so we shall see when the filing for this latest attack is filed.
After the 2020 attack, the company made improvements to their security, so this latest attack will be a very bitter time for those who are responsible for the security of the organisation now, and slightly embarrassing for the company who, in February this year sent a memo to all supply chain partners of the fact that they had taken steps to improve their security and encouraged others to do the same.
