One of America’s largest wholesale food distributors has warned of disruption to its operations after being hit by threat actors.
United Natural Foods (UNFI) said in a Form 8-K filing with the SEC that it became aware of “unauthorized activity” on some IT systems on June 5.
“The company promptly activated its incident response plan and implemented containment measures, including proactively taking certain systems offline, which has temporarily impacted the company’s ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders,” the filing continued.
“The incident has caused, and is expected to continue to cause, temporary disruptions to the company’s business operations.”
UNFI said it has notified law enforcement and is working with third-party security experts to “assess, mitigate, and remediate the incident.”
The firm, which is America’s largest publicly listed health and speciality food distributor, said it had deployed “workarounds for certain operations” in order to minimize disruption for customers. It is also working to bring systems back online.
The incident comes after a string of high-profile ransomware breaches at UK retailers – including M&S, the Co-op and Harrods – and global brands such as Dior and Adidas. Some of these, including M&S and Co-op, were reportedly the work of sophisticated Scattered Spider hackers.
Nick Tausek, lead security automation architect at Swimlane, argued that the food distribution sector is under-protected.
“When the largest publicly traded wholesale distributor in the US, supplying over 30,000 locations across North America, is forced to shut down various systems, it doesn’t just slow distribution; it sends shockwaves through the supply chain,” he said.
“The impact is compounded when you’re dealing with perishable goods. Downtime isn’t solely an operational inconvenience, it’s a race against spoilage and revenue/reputation loss.”
Such organizations must go beyond incident response and focus on cyber-resilience in order to minimize the impact on operations, Tausek argued.
“Cybercriminals are shifting their focus toward operational weak spots and to areas where disruption causes the most damage and the impact is most visible,” he added.
In terms of its potential impact on the food supply chain, the UNFI breach has echoes of a 2021 incident at meat processing giant JBS, which chose to pay $11m to the infamous REvil ransomware group.
