Peter Green Chilled, a logistics firm, has announced that it has been attacked by a ransomware attack, interrupting deliveries of refrigerated goods to some of the country's top supermarkets.
Customers — largely smaller producers who provide food to regional stores in Somerset, such as Aldi, Tesco, and Sainsbury's — received an email last Thursday informing them that the company will be unable to complete part of their orders owing to the cyber incident.
Peter Green Chilled told the BBC that the attack occurred last Wednesday and had no effect on the company's transport business, but he declined to elaborate on how the incident affected the IT infrastructure via which orders are placed.
A substantial part of the nation's frozen food is transported by Reed Boardall, a cold storage and refrigerated transport company that was attacked a number of years ago. Some of its customers have warned that they would be spoilt if they couldn't get their products delivered to retailers in time, despite the fact that Peter Green Chilled is a far smaller supplier than Reed Boardall.
After incidents involving Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, and the upscale London retailer Harrods, this attack is the most recent to affect the British retail industry. A string of recent attacks, including one revealed last week that could expose the personal information of domestic violence victims to their abusers, has prompted renewed calls for the British government to adopt a more active response to the ransomware threat.
Law enforcement agencies should hack the criminals' systems and take them down as the "ideal response" to ransomware gangs' attempts at data extortion, in which the gangs steal data and threaten to release it unless a certain amount of money is paid in cryptocurrency, according to Gareth Mott, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank.
It was not an easy task, Mott said. Even though the National Crime Agency and its allies had been successful in combating ransomware organisations such as LockBit, Mott stated that he was unsure if they currently have the ability to eliminate the most risky data breaches on a selective basis.
