This week’s events are another reminder that today, criminals in the digital environment can pose enormous challenges to businesses and industries that are important to the functioning of the economy.
This week, the hacker attack hit the world’s largest meat processor, JBS, which was forced to close almost all of its US beef processing plants. In addition, the attack affected the company’s infrastructure in Canada and Australia. The information available in the middle of this week showed that the company has managed to resume a large part of its operations.
The attack came just three weeks after a hacking virus was used to knock out the United States’ largest oil pipeline, operated by Colonial Pipeline. As a result, it was suspended for several days. Accordingly, fuel prices in the United States also rose.
These attacks show that more and more cybercriminals are targeting the raw materials market and critical infrastructure. In fact, one major attack has been on energy infrastructure, which raises questions about the security of such supplies. The attack on JBS, on the other hand, is a hint that even food supplies can be insecure. In the case of the United States, JBS is responsible for one-fifth of the country’s pork processing and a quarter of the beef processing.
Today, companies are largely digital. It has its benefits, although there are sometimes benefits to be gained from it – in this case, digital security. In fact, the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds continue and will continue to break down, and crimes are also moving online. In addition, as technology advances, criminals have the opportunity to come up with ever smarter and more sophisticated tools to achieve results. It is even reported that nowadays even quite sophisticated attacks can be automated.
For the time being, it is mostly pointed out that hackers from Russia are behind this particular JBS attack. In this case, too, the attack included elements of extortion. In the Colonial Pipeline case, the company decided to pay hackers bitcoins to about $ 4.4 million. “Everyone will be able to feel the effects of virtual extortion more and more as contenders in this field become more brazen and aggressive,” said cyber security company FireEye.
One can speculate about how well or badly Latvian companies and institutions would be prepared for such attacks and how it could affect the infrastructure that is crucial for our country. It has already been written that, unfortunately, last day also enjoyed Dienas Bizness on its own skin. It was stolen in the first half of September. Db.lv Facebook home page. This was followed by a long and painstaking struggle to recover this website. Db.lv in case of theft was fascinated by our own police response, which actually indicated that nothing can be done – even to initiate a case.
This suggested that the country itself, which was formally actively trying to clarify the importance of the quality of the information space and so on, did not really care much about what was happening to any of its remaining private media. Either way, what is happening suggests: if there is a problem in the Internet environment, basically a person or a company threatens to be completely alone here.
–
