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One-Fifth of U.S. Beef Capacity Wiped Out by JBS Cyberattack

• sparker72678 5y ago
  > JBS’s five biggest beef plants in the U.S. -- which altogether handle 22,500 cattle a day -- have halted processing following a weekend attack on the company’s computer networks, according to JBS posts on Facebook, labor unions and employees. It wasn't clear to me from the headlines that this is about meat plants.
• jokoon 5y ago
  This reminds me of the earlier cyber attacks on a pipelines. One could speculate that those are climate activist attacks.
  • gruez 5y ago
    Don't hacktivists/eco-terrorists usually claim responsibility? Shutting down beef/oil production for a few days isn't going to do much for the environment, if at all since demand basically stays the same, so claiming responsibility and/or getting awareness is the only reason for hacking.
  • titanomachy 5y ago
    This is being downvoted, but it seems like a reasonable theory to me. I know a decent number of brilliant engineers/hackers who are strong proponents of a vegetarian diet. Or maybe it's just a general attack on US food production, and meat is the most vulnerable sector due to its complexity.
    • yaw11 5y ago
      It isn’t reasonable at all.
      • Arrath 5y ago
        As a prelude to Rainbow Six, it might be. Otherwise..
  • yaw11 5y ago
    You could speculate that. Then you could ask yourself why a climate activist would create a situation where cattle starve at the plant and are put down and not used economically. There are thousands of cattle in transit to just one of these facilities every hour of every day. Most are not equipped to feed incoming cattle - they arrive hungry and with minutes to hours to live. If you’re annoyed about the climate, forcing a manufacturer to throw out and waste hundreds of tons of perfectly fine beef does what, exactly? Send a message? This isn’t spiking trees. You’re dealing with live animals. I have a hard time believing an activist environmentalist would be fine with exacerbating an animal welfare situation they already don’t like. Putting thousands of cattle through even worse experiences than usual. Yeah, no. Source: One degree removed from a foreman at an impacted plant. What I’m describing is already happening - plant I’m aware of has 14k head on hand with about 24 hours to figure it out or kill and discard. The administration is already involved and aware of the details, too, and everyone should be vigilant regarding speculation as to who’s behind it (this is likely misdirection, given who it actually is).
    • Arrath 5y ago
      >This isn’t spiking trees. You’re dealing with live animals. I have a hard time believing an activist environmentalist would be fine with exacerbating an animal welfare situation they already don’t like. Putting thousands of cattle through even worse experiences than usual. Yeah, no. Animal rights activists aren't always known for thinking about the consequences of their actions. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/freed-mink-bring-death-to-a-forest-1170769.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/freed-mink-bring-death-to... https://slate.com/technology/2017/07/thousands-of-minks-die-after-being-set-free.html https://slate.com/technology/2017/07/thousands-of-minks-die-...
      • genericuser314 5y ago
        "Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak." ~ Umberto Eco
    • unclebucknasty 5y ago
      Wait. So, you're saying that by virtue of being "one-degree removed from a foreman at an impacted plant", you know who the attackers actually are, and that it contradicts the White House's statement that it's "likely" Russia?
  • simonw 5y ago
    Occam's razor says that the most likely reason for this is that a ransomware group knew that they could extort a lot of money from this company.
• haspoken 5y ago
  http://archive.is/52YQq http://archive.is/52YQq
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Although not a cyberattack it reminds me of the massive supply disruption and culling that occurred in the UK because of the mad cow disease. There is still no clue as to why these disruptions happened but the educated guess mentioned in the article is ransomware. The one that is almost always forgotten is how they they escalated privileges through compromised passwords because most of these organizations don’t use multi factor authentication everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
  • goatinaboat 5y ago
    Although not a cyberattack it reminds me of the massive supply disruption and culling that occurred in the UK because of the mad cow disease Still a form of information warfare attack, perpetuated by none other than Neil Ferguson, operating in plain sight. If he was a hacker he would be in prison but he does incalculable damage again and again and gets away Scot free every time!
  • polskibus 5y ago
    Ransomware attacks were made more feasible (the ransom part) thanks to cryptocurrencies commoditizing low traceability for criminals. I'm pretty sure we're going to see more and more of them, especially with all "digital transformation" going on.
• r00fus 5y ago
  Looks like the backup servers weren't impacted? Still unclear on what this attack consisted of.
• Trisell 5y ago
  I bet their executives didn’t view themselves as running a tech company. Funny how that works these days.
• a3n 5y ago
  I wonder if "ransomware" is merely a cover, and some of this is Russia beta testing economic and infrastructure warfare.
  • bdamm 5y ago
    It could be, but that's something that only privileged elected officials e.g. members of the intelligence committee, US President, past presidents, etc, get to know. If you let yourself get into conspiratorial thinking you'll soon find yourself without any moorings whatsoever. It could also be many other countries or even private entities that get excited about extracting money from big US companies. The list of possibilities is very long.
    • ergot_vacation 5y ago
      Cyber attacks between major powers targeting important infrastructure aren't conspiracy theories; we have plenty of confirmed cases of it at this point. Whether this situation in particular, or the recent oil disruption are targeted attacks is hard to say. As with the "lab origin" situation, it's probably best to avoid whatever the mainstream media is saying and try to find the few rogue experts who aren't being paid to say the right thing (or nothing at all) and thus have no incentives other than the satisfaction of offering a frank assessment (with any luck, you can find them before they're banned from all social media platforms for "misinformation" (ie, disagreeing with the party line)). It took years for any official confirmation of Stuxnet being a state-sponsored attack. But if you were paying attention to the right people, you knew it had all the fingerprints of such an attack pretty early on.
      • bdamm 5y ago
        As a layperson in basically all fields except the very narrow field of my professional career, I have basically a zero chance of finding the "right people" and about a 99% chance of finding someone who sounds like the "right people" and aren't.
• madcows 5y ago
  What's with all the cyber attacks on US infrastructure? I hope this is because of a self hardening mechanism and not what it looks like, continued assault by adversaries.
  • thatguy0900 5y ago
    It's because none of it is secured, and the US has a shit load of infrastructure that all has its own independent systems. Even a tiny percent being hacked per lifetime will be constant hacks in the news.
    • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      None of it was on the internet 30 years ago and we survived. All it takes is responsible corporate leadership to fix this problem.
      • viraptor 5y ago
        Theory: running the same system in pre-internet style would add overhead in salaries and delays that's more costly than being down for a few weeks after a hack.
    • macinjosh 5y ago
      Independent systems have their own problems but also benefits. The trendy word for this is ‘decentralized’. IMHO, I’d prefer we don’t have one big system. At least when the pipeline was shutdown it didn’t affect the entire country.
  • tbihl 5y ago
    Because it always pays
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • kolbe 5y ago
    It's because the US and Europe have shown there aren't any repercussions to defrauding their governments or their citizens.
• hereme888 5y ago
  Are there any details on whether it was ransomware? I'm interested in following this story as it develops.
  • ChuckMcM 5y ago
    Is there any other kind of "cyber attack" with respect to companies like this? This is a serious question, I can't imagine someone DDos'ing or trying to "steal passwords" or "private data" from a meat processor. But disrupting their business and holding them hostage? Seems to be a thing these days.
    • ndespres 5y ago
      In terms of things that are not specifically targeted: I still see things attacks on open SMTP ports to relay spam email, installing crypto mining software on PCs and servers, scanning for insecure VoIP phone systems and racking up long-distance phone bills.. The ransomware attacks makes a lot of headlines I think because it's somewhat easy to sensationalize without a lot of explanation of boring IT stuff, but there are still plenty of other things happening regularly to compromise insecure systems.
      • ChuckMcM 5y ago
        Sure, but those don't typically warrant telling anyone right? I mean "our email server just sent a zillion spam messages, we're working on it." would largely go under the radar I suspect.
        • whatshisface 5y ago
          The big difference is that ransomware is a strike directly against the people who got hacked, while turning servers into bot farms at worst costs them a little electricity. The victims of DDosSes, for example, aren't usually the ones whose compromised systems are running the DDoS.
    • gizmo686 5y ago
• watertom 5y ago
  I remember back in the 90's that there was talk about building out a business focused Internet. I'm now starting to think that it's necessary. I know a lot of people will just say that these companies just need to pay attention to security, but the problem is asymmetrical. Focusing on security is like being a pacifist when dealing with a hostile bully. You get your butt kicked a lot.
  • corty 5y ago
    Business-focused? How should that do anything about security? Do you want to charge an entry fee that evil people cannot afford? Or just label it "serious business only"? Have things audited somehow? I don't think any of that would do any good.
    • s5300 5y ago
      Presumably operating at a much lower level in general so attack vectors are greatly reduced.
    • Jetrel 5y ago
      Yeahhhh. Honestly, "business-focused" decisions like cost-center accounting, and various schemes to save money, are really how we got into this mess. A lot of our appalling lack of computer security basically comes from the equivalent of a hospital administration refusing to allow surgeons the time to wash their hands. As "reductio ad absurdum" of a metaphor as that seems, that was actually the huge culture battle that got fought when germ theory came out - tons of medical practices refused to waste time on such "silliness". Over time it became a cultural norm, and then became a protected practice through professional guilds, and through law, so that even if hospital administrators push for surgeons to hurry up and fit more patients into a day (and they do), their prerogative to take their time and do it right is institutionally protected. We don't have anything like that in programming.
  • paxys 5y ago
    How is a "business focused Internet" different from the internet? Why would it not have the exact same flaws?
• Sparkyte 5y ago
  alright time to go vegan
  • bdamm 5y ago
    Impossible Meat is delicious. My trips to Burger King are now entirely vegetarian.
    • istorical 5y ago
      It needs heavy funding or subsidizing, this sort of product needs to be scaled up fast, because the price per lb of the meat is so much more expensive than low quality chicken, beef, pork etc. purchased at costco type bulk prices.
    • heavyset_go 5y ago
      Does BK separate its griddles and fryers between vegetarian and non-vegetarian items? Because if they don't, then meat products will leach animal fats and proteins while they cook and your vegetarian items will pick them up.
      • xsmasher 5y ago
        That's not ideal, but doesn't cancel the health and climate benefits of eating vegetarian.
      • PeterisP 5y ago
        That level of touching matters only for allergies (are pig-fat-allergies a thing?) and religious taboos, not for "mainstream" vegetarianism.
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    There’s no reason to believe that the plants that produce vegan products are any more secure; if veganism became the norm then the infrastructure required to process that food would be as valuable a target as meat processing is today.
• GnarfGnarf 5y ago
  I hope it's beginning to sink in to corporate America: you need to get serious about security. Go Linux. Hire many permanent security experts with continuous audit processes. Acknowledge the true cost of IT.
  • 7373737373 5y ago
    Rather, go microkernels! (Recursive) sandboxing and resource control have to become a thing: https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index Permissions should be able to be set in a fine grained way, capability security needs to become much more well known: https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41
    • tibbydudeza 5y ago
      Probably their plants has some industrial equipment that is still running on Windows 2000.
      • reilly3000 5y ago
        Absolutely. Plenty of America runs on EOL Windows XP legacy apps that have been too complicated to migrate. Sometimes they run airgapped until someone realizes that isn’t practical. CEOs must demand better and be willing to pay for it. Without leadership support these migrations almost always fail.
        • 7373737373 5y ago
          And (operating) system and programming language designers must make security a foundational property of their systems. Most modern languages will never be secure, because their semantics necessitate things like global names. Trying to graft security extensions onto an existing language that wasn't built with them in mind will be painstaking and will always lag behind and is thus often abandoned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project
  • 5y ago
• Analemma_ 5y ago
  Targeting politically important industries rather than strategically important ones (no price increases get people quite as fumed and likely to take to the streets as gasoline and meat price increases) is an interesting development in quasi-state-sponsored cybercrime.
  • dudleypippin 5y ago
    Interesting. My third thought was “Huh, perhaps we’ll be eating less beef until the inevitable price shock and hoarding passes.” (First thought was for the poor IT folks stuck in this mess and the second was remembering a sensitive machine that was open to all of AWS because the vendor’s servers “needed access to push frequent updates.” and “nobody has ever pushed back on that requirement before.”)
  • briefcomment 5y ago
    Klaus Schwab of the WEF “predicted” this a year ago [1]. Either the WEF and other NGOs are incredibly prescient on a number of unrelated issues, or we may be getting taken for a ride. [1]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0DKRvS-C04o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0DKRvS-C04o
  • neither_color 5y ago
    gasoline and meat price increases These hackers sure are progressive. I wonder what they'll target next: plastics, flights, or ammo?
    • mtalantikite 5y ago
      My first thought was imagining a hacker org taking inspiration from the movie 12 Monkeys.
  • r00fus 5y ago
    In the case of the pipeline disruption, it was reported that the USG disrupted the CCC of the ransomer and their crypto accounts were drained. I wonder if a similar sort of reaction will happen here or if the attackers will move more quickly? From a technical standpoint, why was JBS' backup chain a workable solution for JBS and not for the pipeline operator? Was it incompetence on the part of the attacker or just a better defense, or luck?
• tonyb 5y ago
  Looks like I'll end up having to pull brisket off the menu again this summer (I own & operate a BBQ food truck). Before this latest blow to the supply chain I have already seen a 66% increase in brisket prices in the past 4 weeks ($2.99/lb about a month ago, current price is $4.99). The restaurant industry is already running on low margins so it will be interesting to see how this is all going to shake out.
  • asdff 5y ago
    You could put brisket at market price like lobster roll food trucks tend to do. People still happily pay $18 for a lobster roll from a truck.
    • tonyb 5y ago
      Raising prices is an option but that is very market dependant. BBQ customers in general are more price sensitive than lobster customers and I would lose sales at a higher price point. There is a certain price (which I have generally found is $4.50 - $4.99/lb, that is when my food cost for a brisket sandwich hits 50%. Target food cost should be somewhere around 30%) where it just isn't worth it to sell brisket. BBQ is somewhat unique in that you have to estimate your demand ahead of time - you can't just throw on another brisket if you run out and I don't reheat/re-use leftovers. So even if I raise my prices $2/sandwich to cover the increased cost my risk is still higher because any unsold product is now a higher loss.
      • koolba 5y ago
        Is it possible to purchase the cuts in advance and store them frozen or does that noticeably effect the quality? Seems straightforward to through some cuts in a deep freezer to smooth out supply costs. I do that on the small scale at home though obviously the capital costs would be proportionally larger at scale.
        • tonyb 5y ago
          That's exactly what I did starting about a month ago - I've got enough on hand to last about a month (most of that is committed to catering jobs that already have a set price - so my forecasting is much easier but if I didn't lock in the price I would have to eat the difference). As long as they are safely handled I've found no quality difference at all when freezing stuff that is cryo-vaced. More often than not it has already been frozen at least once before it gets to me. I don't ever sell anything that has been re-heated after cooking though. You can also do that with little to no quality loss but I try to position myself as a premium brand so everything is 'cooked to order'. There are also a lot more food safety concerns (cooing it fast enough, re-heating it fast enough, etc.) that I don't want to worry about. I vacuum seal cooked BBQ at home and it's just as good as fresh but you can't do that in a commercial setting without special permits that aren't available to food trucks (at least not in my area).
• jl6 5y ago
  The technical debt collector has arrived. This is going to get worse before it gets better.
  • young_unixer 5y ago
    How will it get better?
    • whatshisface 5y ago
      Losses due to underinvestment will motivate investment. Some companies will invest more wisely than others. Eventually every company will be wisely investing in security, by copying companies that got it right or by being replaced by them.
    • jl6 5y ago
      Possible outcomes from most to least likely: * Non-tech industry belatedly starts prioritising cyber security; security gradually gets better while costs increase and infosec consultants enjoy a Y2K-style boom. * Tech-competent startups outcompete non-tech industries through avoiding ransom costs. * The international internet degrades into mostly-closed national networks with end-to-end government control and monitoring. * The US government starts treating these attacks as national security threats and goes all War on Terror, probably triggered by a hit on critical infrastructure that costs lives. Heinous collateral damage.
    • Raidion 5y ago
      Data security will get better as the risk calculus changes. A lot of companies are mentally doing math: (Probability of cyber attack per year) * (cost of ransom + costs of downtime) = X, (Overhead of additional cybersecurity personnel)= Y If X < Y, it's basically just a no brainier to just eat the costs and pay the X million if it happens. If Y > X, they hire security personnel and it "gets better". If the government makes paying the ransom less attractive (via basically labeling it as a financial transaction with a sanctioned entity making it illegal) OR the probability of the cyber attack goes up (as this becomes more lucrative), risk calculus changes, security is improved, and it "gets better".
    • 5y ago
• tibbydudeza 5y ago
  First Covid - now the great hamburger shortage of 2021.
• nyc_pizzadev 5y ago
  I seriously think one solution to this problem is for the US gov to start designating some of these gangs as something similar to enemies of the state and start taking military action against them. If there were serious repercussions for these actions, like serious jail time or even something more grave... then that changes the calculus for people running these gangs. At minimum, this shows the gov is taking this threat seriously. EDIT: ok bad idea, lets take it easy on my poor account :)
  • zdkl 5y ago
    Your intent is to drop US missiles or troops on Russia-Eastern Europe/China-SE Asia? That may have different outcomes than what you're imagining.
    • nyc_pizzadev 5y ago
      Right, that would be war. My understanding is that the gov has more covert methods... We hunted enemies before in other nations with some success.
      • f38zf5vdt 5y ago
        Why not? $40 trillion dollars in weapons spending would easily save $10 billion dollars it would cost to hire security professionals on an annual salary to patch software and ensure that intrusion was more difficult.
      • Raidion 5y ago
        This is exactly what they're doing now, they're just doing it with law enforcement agencies and not military. Military is honestly going to be worse at all of this, as they don't have the investigative capacity. This also ducks the very thorny political problems where Ukraine (never mind Russia!)are NOT going to allow US military involvement in domestic affairs, but do have agreements with Interpol that make this possible. Nobody wants extrajudicial military extraction squads acting on their turf. I'm sure the various 3 letter agencies (NSA, CIA, etc) are already involved to a degree that's not publicly known.
• arrosenberg 5y ago
  The cyberattack and the fact that one company had 20% of the country's beef processing capacity. A more distributed economy with smaller operators means fewer, less valuable targets for piracy, as well as more supply chain resilience when one company is taken offline.
  • Animats 5y ago
    At least they don't have 60% market share. What happens when FedEx or Union Pacific goes down?
    • dfsegoat 5y ago
      This was an interesting and valid point. Container ship based freight looks to be a bit more fragmented: https://www.statista.com/statistics/198206/share-of-leading-container-ship-operators-on-the-world-liner-fleet/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/198206/share-of-leading-... https://shippingwatch.com/carriers/Container/article12930338.ece https://shippingwatch.com/carriers/Container/article12930338...
      • Animats 5y ago
        A few years, back, Maersk went down for almost a week due to encryption-type malware.[1] Things happen slowly enough in sea shipping that the impacts were mostly to Maersk itself. It cost them about US$330 million. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-attack-maersk-idUSKBN19I1NO https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-attack-maersk-idUSK...
        • mindracer 5y ago
          Crazy how they were saved by a domain controller that had been knocked offline by a power outage before the worm hit
          • midasuni 5y ago
            Why couldn’t they restore from backup?
• mxuribe 5y ago
  Dear diary, Today, I was finally able to incorporate the "Where's the beef!?!" catch-phrase into daily conversation! But, it just didn't land as funny as I was expecting in my mind.
• coliveira 5y ago
  Hackers are laughing at the idea of concentrating large amounts of the economy at a single company. The whole internet will be coming to a halt once this can replicated on at least one of the big web companies.
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/2MasR https://archive.is/2MasR
• yosamino 5y ago
  So this random article [0] I googled says it's ransomware. Can that really be called an "attack" ? JBS said: not aware of any evidence that any customer, supplier, or employee data has been compromised So the "attackers" didn't steal anything. Give them the finger then, restore from backup, get upset about losing 25 minutes of data and keep going. How are ransomware "attacks" still a thing ? Why is any of the software that controlls meat-cutting/oil pipeline hardware not air-gapped under normal operations? How is there no plan on how to continue operating when losing power, so that stuff still works? One of these "attacks" pops up every three days and I get that if data is exfiltrated then the problem is not the same. BUT "someone encrypted all my data" and "oh shit, my harddrive crashed" have almost the exact same recovery plan and we have dedicated a complete international holiday called World Backup Day[1] over ten years ago to remind people of the principles of how that works that were known since at least when harddrives where invented. It's not an attack, it's pure negligence. It's not special IT SuperHighTechnologyKnowledge either. It's a simple principle: Things need to exist in at least three places in case one of them breaks and the other explodes/tornadoes/earthquakes. The slightly advanced corollary is: Make sure that the thing in the three places is actually the thing that it should be. ... It's not like I do not understand how organizations fail at this that or the other and that maybe the tradeoffs here were made correctly, but it still boggles the mind. [0] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/06/01/cyberattack-on-jbs-n2590301 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/06/01/cyber... [1] http://www.worldbackupday.com/en/ http://www.worldbackupday.com/en/
  • worik 5y ago
    "How are ransomware "attacks" still a thing ?" It is cheaper to build a shoddy system out of the pre-made parts that software companies sell. A shiny very capable system can be built quickly, and cheaply. To build a robust system, segmented, properly backed up, maintained professionally... costs a lot more. To have staff on your payroll who understand your systems, who can maintain your systems and recover your systems in a disaster means having expensive professionals on the payroll who look like they are doing nothing. When your whole business goes into a paralysis because of the costs you saved, there will be some one to blame. Some clerk in a office that "clicked on a attachment" - it is their fault.... Yes, it is cheaper in the long run to build robust maintained systems. But in the long run we are all dead, and our bonuses will be paid before the catastrophe, and anyway it is "some body else's fault".
• client4 5y ago
  Hot take: the US is going to use these highly publicized hacks as impetus for implementing our own "Great Firewall"...for our safety, of course.
  • Roboprog 5y ago
    We need to ban all assault computers with more than 8 CPUs now. Think of the subsidiaries, er, children!!! Does this fall under violating the First Amendment, or the Second?
    • Jtsummers 5y ago
      Core count seems a less-than-useful restriction on its own. Clock rate, cache sizes, and instructions per cycle need to be limited for this to be effective. Then bandwidth has to be constrained to avoid people building Beowulf clusters of RISC-V systems (which we won't be able to buy in the US thanks to "munitions" import restrictions from overseas producers). RAM and disk capacities will also have to be limited for similar reasons. As will their speeds.
      • procombo 5y ago
        CPU enthusiasts, builders, and overclockers would get put on a government list, then shadowbanned from social video platforms for encouraging domestic cyber terrorism.
• lettergram 5y ago
  The U.S. needs to make it illegal to pay ransom. Then respond with force, arresting people, targeting however you can. Further, this should be a wake up call. If you're a business harden your network and make backups.
  • miketery 5y ago
    Most adversaries are in non extradition regions.
    • tomschlick 5y ago
      If those countries take away the legal system route of extradition for attacks on critical infrastructure, then in my mind its justifiable to go the batman style of extradition with a special forces team.
      • young_unixer 5y ago
        Or make hacking legal so that companies start taking appropiate measures instead of labelling themselves as victims.
        • tomschlick 5y ago
          White hat hacking, sure.
      • yaw13 5y ago
        Because fixing the infrastructure couldn’t possibly work, we need renditions and live fire operations. Totally.
        • ncphil 5y ago
          Fixing infrastructure won't get done because the people in charge are too stupid, lazy and greedy to fix it. Most of them are so wealthy they're completely insulated from the consequences of their actions (or inaction, as the case may be). Folks need to wake up and realize they're living in a global public-private idiocracy.
• joejerryronnie 5y ago
  Do we have ransomware credit default swaps yet?
• jpmattia 5y ago
  In a perverse way, the recent attacks on infrastructure are a good thing. Can you imagine if these all hit in a coordinated attack during actual hostilities? Yes it's painful and interferes with the economy, but ultimately this will harden up potential targets. And boy do some of these guys need hardening up.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • pradn 5y ago
    While this is one line of thinking, in another way of thinking, we're just now in a perpetual cyber cold war. As long as there are some rogue nations that turn their eyes away from cybercriminals, or adversaries that actively promote them, we're going to have an endless series of outages - every possible thing from factories to toll roads to desalination plants to illicit photos.
    • stingraycharles 5y ago
      I don’t think a Cold War is a good description of what’s happening; it’s not as if there’s some arms race going on as it is just a very public exposure of how bad our overall tech / security infrastructure is. The question is whether the pains we’re currently feeling are enough to cause a change in the industries affected.
      • joemazerino 5y ago
        The arms race is in exploits and software development. The country with the largest stockpile of the former and the best talent in the latter will emerge the victor.
        • PeterisP 5y ago
          A large stockpile of exploits can only harm someone else's economy, and it does not protect your economy. So perhaps your neighbour will suffer more than you do, but none of you will be winners in any sense.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• davidw 5y ago
  This seems like too much consolidation: > The U.S. meat industry is so consolidated that with JBS basically offline due to a cyberattack, the USDA can't publish wholesale price data without potentially revealing proprietary information about JBS’s competitors From https://twitter.com/sjcasey/status/1399822226313076737 https://twitter.com/sjcasey/status/1399822226313076737
  • clarkmoody 5y ago
    Overbearing regulation by the federal government is the direct cause of the dangerous consolidation we have in the meat industry. The greater the consolidation, the greater the damage from bacteria outbreaks, or in this case cyberattacks.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      We have more stringent food regs in EU and yet we have less consolidation
    • munificent 5y ago
      Consolidation is the natural tendency of all businesses, independent of regulation. Powerful businesses may capture regulation to further entrench their consolidation, but don't confuse cause for effect here. Regulatory capture doesn't happen until after you have a powerful enough cartel to start buying politicians.
      • nickff 5y ago
        Regulations usually carry a fixed cost, regardless of scale, so the easiest way to reduce their impact on margins is to consolidate. Big businesses are often in favor of regulations because they create moats which small businesses cannot cross.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • 5y ago
• gwright 5y ago
  > Capacity Wiped Out Overly dramatic and inaccurate as far as I can tell. Something like a contagion introduced into the facility might warrant a "Wiped Out" description but "Production Paused" seems more accurate and informative.
  • yborg 5y ago
    Yes, makes it sound like 20% of the cattle in the US were somehow killed by ransomware.
• SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  > as hackers increasingly target critical infrastructure. Many attacks aren't truly targeted, they're blanket ransomware attacks trying to hit any entity they can. Also, meat packing isn't critical infrastructure. It's important, sure, but nobody is going to die if they don't get meat. Food overall, yes, but meat is a luxury good.
  • admax88q 5y ago
    If meat collapses it will put strain on other parts of the food pipeline which might not be able to pick up the slack. There's a lot of calories in meat.
    • deeblering4 5y ago
      Are there a lot of calories in meat? I always looked at meat by itself as pretty lean. By volume I think there are quite a few types of food that are richer in calories, and a lot of times meats are rich due to how they are prepared (fried, or drenched in butter, etc.)
      • akiselev 5y ago
        Depends on how lean the meat and how dense the fat but generally only processed foods (like bread) are more calorie dense than meat. Protein and sugar (carbs) provide 4 kcal per gram while fat provides 9 kcal per gram and our gastrointestinal tracts are better adapted to carnivorous than herbivorous diets (compared to, say, cows or rabbits). We're simply unable to digest a lot of the mass in fruits and vegetables like the insoluble fiber and animal husbandry's purpose is to convert that material to edible food - it'd be pretty pointless if it wasn't more calorie dense.
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Yes, There are a lot of calories is meat, even without additions. See bellow for calories in 100g of common foods. The only things that are more calorie dense than meat are primarily composed of sugar or fat. 271 Beef 265 bread 247 Roast chicken, skin on 130 black beans 110 rice 57 Apples 35 Broccoli
• joemazerino 5y ago
  I'm curious as to how so-called cyber insurance plays out with these attacks.
• cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
  Good, I hope this encourages people to support plant based alternatives and "vat meat" type stuff. The meat industry is awful for two major disaster scenarios facing humanity: global warming and antibiotic resistance. Meat isn't "critical infrastructure", it's a luxury with health risks akin to other luxury products that are taxed, and is propped up and subsidized already in order to survive. This is not even beginning to talk about the ethics of this situation. People like Noam Chomsky etc have been behind this: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/12/features/noam-chomsky-couple-generations-organized-human-society-may-not-survive-has-be https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/12/features/noam-ch... No one would be particularly choked up if this affected the cigarette industry or the alcohol industry.
  • hourislate 5y ago
    Yeah, we should also take a stand against all the plants and fruits we are farming. It is incredibly bad for the environment (ex: pesticides, water usage,slave labor practices, etc). The whole food sector is a major producer of Green house gasses and farming whether livestock or grains, etc is extremely bad for the environment. Lets save the planet and stop eatin.
    • cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
      I mean, I'm all for humanity dying out at some point, but this is a question of harm reduction...I don't really understand the logic in "But ALL food production has some net impact, checkmate!" By virtue of living we are endlessly consuming. The answer to that isn't to jump off a cliff or restrict ourselves to the point where we can barely function within current society. We have to eat, and we have to work within the supply chain system we have now. We can campaign long term for fair trade/accountable supply chains and that's probably never going to be perfect. But if you have an option that involves by definition the unethical slaughter and treatment of billions of animals that has diminishing returns as far as calories/nutrients go (you can feed soybeans to cows, and eat that one cow, or feed soybeans directly to people) the choice seems very simple. People often take pride in recycling or doing other carbon footprint cutting measures like driving a prius, switching off the lights, and so forth. But I could drive a Hummer every day to work and have less of a carbon footprint if I don't eat animal products. It may not be reasonable for everyone to cut meat out of their diet due to food desserts, society, and so forth at this point, but that doesn't mean that it makes any sense from an environmental, ethical, or health perspective to keep factory farming. There is no question that it should be on its way out - if you believe in anyway that coal/oil should be phased out, look at the data on what factory farming contributes to global warming and tell me there's any justification for that not to be phased out as well. I can be against factory farming and also against human trafficking and sweat shops. Both are bad. It's not a good argument to say that since there's exploitation in the food chain regardless, it doesn't matter. It's a question of harm reduction.
• dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Bloomberg missed opportunity to use kiwi slang word 'cooked' in the title: >One-Fifth of U.S. Beef Capacity Cooked by JBS Cyberattack
• adictator 5y ago
  Beautiful!
• nextstep 5y ago
  I hope this attack aims to destroy the infrastructure of an environmentally disastrous industry and isn’t just a ransomware attack.
• sida 5y ago
  We can also just cut off crypto which kills random payment
• 4b11b4 5y ago
  Good. Meat industry destroying earth, people's bodies.
• standardUser 5y ago
  Now none of us will be able to buy beef for a month because a small contingent of reactionaries are going to stockpile. At least that's what happened when there were reports of meat processing plants getting shutdown by COVID. Not to mention the famous toilet paper debacle. I'd almost say we need a legal way to prevent hoarding during these fake shortages, because it's the hoarding that creates the actual shortage.
  • munificent 5y ago
    > Not to mention the famous toilet paper debacle. This is the kind of false narrative that spreads like wildfire because it rests on a morality play we all love about how a small number of those people are ruining it for everyone else. In reality, the toilet paper shortage was caused by people using their home toilets instead of office ones. Office toilets use different toilet paper (those giant rolls of pretty scratchy paper). Those rolls are manufactured on different lines, shipped through different supply chains, and sold in different stores. Paper companies have incredibly thin margins, and it took a while for them to retool and shift over to the new reality. The shortage was just the dip while that was happening. Basically, sales of product A (residential TP) skyrocketed while product B tanked (office TP). No surprise that it became hard to find A in stores. Hoarding didn't have a significant impact. (Think about it, how could it have? The shortage was a few weeks long. Think about how much toilet paper a small number of hoarders would have to have to cause a shortage of that scale. Did they literally fill their entire house with rolls?)
  • jessaustin 5y ago
    Rational people bought bidets or just used the shower already installed in their bathroom, rather than going full Road-Warrior in search of toilet paper. Non-rational people chose otherwise. In this case, too, rational people will substitute other proteins for beef. As a beef producer, I'm glad most Americans aren't completely rational consumers.
• hikerclimb 5y ago
  Good.
• okareaman 5y ago
  Forgive me if these are dumb questions because I'm a programmer not a network engineer, but why are companies exposing critical information and systems to the global internet? Surely there must be a market for a physically separate and secure private network. Why in 2021 hasn't the email attachment problem been solved. Surely we can sandbox email attachments as the default and only move them out of the sandbox when the consequences of opening them are known. Why are we allowing large sums in the millions to be transferred around the world without giving law enforcement the ability to intercede?
  • lps41 5y ago
    So people can work from home, is probably the most common reason. And many companies probably don’t consider themselves a likely target until after it happens.
    • prawn 5y ago
      I don't think the former would be even in the upper-tier of reasons. This company would be a great example of one not considering themselves a likely target though!
  • capableweb 5y ago
    > Why are we allowing large sums in the millions to be transferred around the world without giving law enforcement the ability to intercede? I agree with the rest of your comment but this strikes me as a strange question. Programmers if anyone should realize that you can't always 100% selectively give "good guys" access to something easily without also opening up potential weaknesses for "bad guys". Especially when it comes to large transfers or other essential information, it has to be secure and private for the participants and the participants only.
    • okareaman 5y ago
      My last question came in response to recent criticism of crypto currency here: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399058952336277505 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399058952336277505 and similar. As someone pointed out, ransomware payments in the millions can't happen without crypto. Banks would stop the electronic payments and cash would require suitcases.
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  First it's gasoline (transport being the biggest cause of greenhouse gases in the US), now it's beef. If this were a movie, I'd suspect climate terrorists.
• godelski 5y ago
  Why don't we have a branch of the government that is purely cyber defense? I know a bunch of you are going to say NSA, but we all know that they are more occupied with offense and that they don't have great interests to patch things because then they give up weapons that they have.
  • nexuist 5y ago
    NIST for civilians, I think. The Air Force has a lot of cyber teams as well as ECM (electronic counter-measures) equipment.
    • godelski 5y ago
      NIST provides recommendations a guidelines. But no one is blue teaming.
• anti-nazi 5y ago
  that's it?
• unstatusthequo 5y ago
  Where is the clever Chick-fil-A ad? Or prolly sus. ;)
  • hereme888 5y ago
    Lol, I thought of that as well; the chik-fil-a cows did it.
• calkuta 5y ago
  Casual discussion of mass murder
• ineedasername 5y ago
  If there's any sort of bright side to this, it's that no one is going to tolerate continued attacks of this type much longer. It's clear that they're no longer a minor threat and that the vague boogeyman of countless techno-thrillers over the last few decades where hackers bring down massive pieces of infrastructure is no longer fiction, it's here. What's more, these cannot be considered simple criminal acts: If these were (or are) state-sponsored attacks, they are pretty close to acts of war. Short of that, they are quickly rising to the level of terrorism. That takes the decision to pay off these hackers out if the hands of irresponsible companies and puts it in the hands of those who handle national security.
  • boomboomsubban 5y ago
    I struggle to see how considering these terrorist acts or acts of war is a "bright side."
    • ineedasername 5y ago
      Is the prospect that we might finally take meaningful action not a bright side? That it will be impossible to ignore? You are unimaginative if you interpret "bright" as "a good thing". Of course things are getting worse. But we are unfortunately in a situation where things may need to get worse before we take action to make it better. It is not unreasonable to hope that we have finally hit that point, it is the first step towards positive actions, and that is the brighter side if a descent into a deeper and deeper hole is to be avoided. It's easy to post a pithy critical response to a comment. Deciding to take the time to understand the subtlety involved takes more time. Maybe next time you should keep in mind the community guidelines that set the tone for how to interpret comments and make substantive replies that are not simply low-effort one-liners. Especially on my comment that fully acknowledges the crap we're in but sees the latest development as a possible catalyst for change. It's easy to criticize, it's much harder, but more productive, to engage in an actual conversation. I'm sorry you chose the low road, many on HN are better than that.
      • boomboomsubban 5y ago
• throwaway316943 5y ago
  I’m just waiting until one of these groups really screws the pooch and gets scooped up and tried for treason and then executed.
• raziel2701 5y ago
  The beef industry has adopted crypto! /s
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Ekaros 5y ago
  I'm more and more starting to see this as failure in process resiliency. Unless each and every computer and smartphone is encrypted by ransomware they should still be able to run things at some level. With people doing things manually. Might have to give out some overtime pays, but still... Like in pipeline case the choice of just stopping operating should have massive regulatory cost.
• mac01021 5y ago
  A couple of jobs back, there was a day when our app stopped working. After poking around in the database a little bit I found out that most of our data had been deleted and replaced with a ransom demand including the address of a bitcoin wallet. After a few minutes of ineffectually pondering the occurrence, we restored our latest database backup which was maybe half a day old and then beefed up our passwords and network security. The ransom note went straight into the trash. So I wonder, does "ransomware" refer simply to an attack like the one I experienced or something more sophisticated. Do all these companies just not have secure backups?
  • flarg 5y ago
    One app and you're good, but a network of interconnected systems and a couple of domain controllers and the backups are never in sync.
  • rlayton2 5y ago
    If they can find your backups, then they can encrypt those too, wait a few cycles and then give you your notice.
• diveanon 5y ago
  The United States' failing infrastructure, both physical and digital, will be its downfall. How fragile are we as a nation if a group of profit motivated hackers can shut down oil pipelines and food production? What happens when a hostile nation state or terror organization actually wants to do some damage and isn't interested in negotiating with insurance companies for a few BTC. Maybe if the DHS was focused on actual threats instead of cosplaying as SS we would be prepared for what everyone knew was coming.
• ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  Someone tweeted a response "0xDEADBEEF" and I thought it was the best thing