Supplier to major supermarkets hit by cyber attack

A distributor to the UK’s major supermarkets has said it is being held to ransom by cyber hackers.

Logistics firm Peter Green Chilled says it supplies supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Aldi, but it is not in the top 30 of UK food distributors.

It told BBC’s Wake Up to Money clients were “receiving regular updates” including “workarounds” on how to continue deliveries.

One of its customers, Black Farmer founder Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, said pallets containing thousands of his products could go to waste.

It comes after recent major cyber-attacks on Marks & Spencer and Co-op.

A ransomware attack is where hackers encrypt a victim’s data and lock them out of computer systems, demanding payment to hand back control.

In an email sent on Thursday, seen by the BBC, Peter Green Chilled said it had been the victim of a ransomware attack.

It said no orders would be processed on Thursday, although any order prepared on Wednesday would be sent.

It confirmed to the BBC the cyber attack happened on Wednesday evening but it was not in a position to discuss further.

“The transport activities of the business have continued unaffected throughout this incident,” its managing director Tom Binks said.

One of the supermarket suppliers affected is Mr Emmanuel-Jones.

He said that he had “something like ten pallets worth of meat products” with Peter Green Chilled.

He said if those products don’t get to the retailers in time they will have to be “thrown in the bin”.

Ten pallets is “thousands and thousands of packs of products, sitting there, and the clock is ticking,” he said. “There’s no information. Everything along the chain has to be stopped, and then there are thousands of pounds worth of product that are just wasting away.”

Co-op narrowly avoided being locked out of its systems during an attack which exposed customer data and caused shortages of stock.

A ransomware group claimed responsibility for the attack on M&S which saw customer data stolen and empty shelves. The retailer itself said it had suffered a cyber attack.

Phil Pluck, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, said the warehousing, food storage and distribution sectors were “constantly under attack”.

A few years ago, there were a few cyber and ransomware attacks, but in the last year there has been “a huge increase”, he said.

About half of the food consumed in the UK “goes through the cold chain sector”, he said, so hackers “know how critical” distribution is for “putting food on supermarket shelves”.

He added that was “a really good lever to put the pressure on our companies to actually pay that ransomware”.

Mr Pluck said that he knew of at least ten attacks on member companies, but that firms like to keep attacks “under the radar”.

He said cyber attacks were “hugely underreported” in any sector “because once you’re attacked you lose control of your company” both through the attack and the mitigations by police and insurers.