A dairy company owned by Coca-Cola Company suffered data theft as well as production outages following a July ransomware attack, the drinks giant has revealed.
Coca-Cola said in a brief statement on July 27 that Chicago-based Fairlife had now “resumed the majority of production” at its four US facilities.
However, it added that the incident reported earlier in July “involved access by an unauthorized third party to a portion of the company’s systems and taking of certain data,” as well as production outages.
Fairlife makes over $1bn in annual revenue from its ultra-filtered milk and protein shakes.
Read more on ransomware: Coca-Cola Investigates Data Breach Claim
Coca-Cola explained in an SEC Form 8-K filing that its subsidiary identified unauthorized access on July 16.
Although incident response and business continuity protocols kicked in and external experts were brought in to assist, the firm was forced to temporarily shut down production in the US.
According to screenshots posted to X, ransomware group Anubis was behind the breach. It claimed to have 671GB of data including HR records, engineering/technical documentation and production data. The group said it has now leaked this trove on its ransomware blog.
A Long Shelf Life
Ross Filipek, CISO at Corsica Technologies, argued that the data theft may have a “much longer shelf life” than the production shutdown that impacted the company.
“That information creates options. Criminals could impersonate executives or vendors. They could redirect payments or target employees with convincing phishing messages. Operational details could also reveal which suppliers are essential and where future disruption would create the most pressure,” he suggested.
“The broader lesson is that internal business data shouldn’t be treated as harmless simply because it isn’t customer-facing. Organizations need to know where that information lives. Access should be limited, monitored, and separated so one compromised system doesn’t expose the company’s entire playbook.”
For its part, Coca-Cola played down any long-term impact from the incident.
“Retail availability of Fairlife products has been largely unimpacted, due to the availability of existing inventory. Product quality and safety have not been impacted,” it noted in its statement.
“Based on the information currently available, the company believes the incident has not had, and is not reasonably likely to have, a material impact on the company’s financial condition or results of operations.”
