Dole Hit With Ransomware Attack That Had ‘Limited’ Effect
(Bloomberg) -- Dole Plc said it was recently hit with ransomware, the latest company to be targeted in a series of high-profile cyberattacks.
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The fresh food producer said Thursday it was working with cybersecurity experts to contain the impact of the hack, and was cooperating with a police investigation.
The effect on operations was “limited,” the company said in a statement, without giving any further details. CNN, which earlier reported the incident, said production at several of of Dole’s food processing plants had been temporarily shut down, citing a memo from a company unit executive sent to distributors.
A Dole spokesman declined to confirm CNN’s report.
Ransomware infects a business’s systems to encrypt company files, rendering them unusable. The files usually can only be recovered after paying a ransom in return for a decryption key, a process that can take months.
British postal organization the Royal Mail, financial firm ION Trading UK and chipmaker MKS Instruments Inc. were recently attacked by ransomware. The hack of MKS Instruments caused one of its customers, chipmaker Applied Materials Inc., to lose $250 million in sales because of delays.
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