Salzburgmilch faces cyber attack

The longest day of the year turned out to be a nightmare for the Austrian dairy Salzburgmilch, which that night was victim of a cyber attack and so far the company is still working on solving the problems. The Salzburg State Criminal Police Office is investigating.

Previously unknown hackers had paralysed all IT systems at the dairy. All areas of the company such as logistics, warehousing and communication were affected by the failure. All passwords and a lot of the data behind them were encrypted by the perpetrators in such a way that the computer systems could fail completely. Orders were no longer possible as a result.

Experts are after a week still working on repairing the damage.

The hacking attack had no impact on the dairy farmers, as the raw milk could still be collected. The dairy can process the delivered raw milk and manufacture dairy products, but in the days after the cyber attack it could not record products in the storage system and for some days could not supply the trading partners.

According to the Austrian press, Salzburgmilch is in negotiations with the criminals. The company has not provided any information about whether there are ransom demands, and if so, what amount is being demanded. The amount of damage has also not yet been quantified.