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A cyber attack on a major US food distributor has led to empty shelves at US grocery store giant Whole Foods.
United Natural Foods (UNFI) announced that it suffered a cyber attack last week that has affected supply chain operations.
“We have identified unauthorised activity in our systems and have proactively taken some systems offline while we investigate,” said UNFI.
“As soon as we discovered the activity, an investigation was initiated with the help of leading forensics experts, and we have notified law enforcement. We are assessing the unauthorised activity and working to restore our systems to safely bring them back online.
“As we work through this issue, our customers, suppliers, and associates are our highest priority. We are working closely with them to minimise disruption as much as possible.”
While the company has not described the nature of the incident, UNFI chief executive Sandy Douglas told Reuters that it was looking at “helping our customers with short-term solutions wherever possible” and said its entire network had been shut down.
UNFI is one of the key suppliers of Amazon’s Whole Foods grocery stores and supplies over 250,000 products and services over 30,000 stores and supermarkets across the US and Canada.
Following the cyber attack, it is supplying goods “on a limited basis” and was in the middle of trialling a new product with Whole Foods but that much of its products were not delivered.
The direct impact on Whole Foods is currently unclear, but the company said that it is having “temporary supply challenges” and that the incident affected UNFI’s “ability to select and ship products from their warehouses”.
Speaking with TechCrunch, Whole Foods spokesperson Nathan Cimbala apologised for the outages and lack of product.
“We are working to restock our shelves as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused for customers,” he said.
According to reports, Whole Foods has instructed staff to limit customer communications other than what has been said.
It is likely that the real impact of the incident will only be seen as the week continues and as product availability continues to be hampered.
Cyber Daily has not yet observed threat actors taking responsibility for the incident.
The latest cyber incident follows a trio of UK grocery and other retailers suffering cyber incidents causing stock shortages.
Marks & Spencer (M&S), Co-op, and Harrods all suffered cyber attacks believed to have been orchestrated by the Scattered Spider hacking collective and DragonForce ransomware operation.
A number of major US fashion retailers, including adidas, Dior, Victoria’s Secret, and Cartier, have also been plagued by cyber attacks.
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