The world’s largest meat company paid an $11 million ransom to hackers who shut down its processing facilities.
JBS USA Holdings Inc. paid the cybercriminals in Bitcoin, after last week’s attack temporarily disrupted plants that process half the country’s meat supply, the company’s CEO told The Wall Street Journal Wednesday.
Andre Nogueira told the paper he made the ransom payment to protect JBS plants from more attacks and to minimize the damage to restaurants, stores and farmers that depend on the company.
“It was very painful to pay the criminals, but we did the right thing for our customers,” Nogueira reportedly said.
The JBS attack was the latest ransomware intrusion into an essential service provider’s operating system.
The operators of the Colonial Pipeline paid cybercriminals $4.4 million last month to regain control of its technical operations. The US was able to recover the majority of the money by seizing bitcoin from a wallet used by the DarkSide hacker collective.