A distributor to the UK’s major supermarkets has said it is being held to ransom by cyber hackers.
Logistics firm Peter Green Chilled said it supplies supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Aldi, but it is relatively small compared with larger UK food distributors.
It told BBC’s Wake Up to Money clients were “receiving regular updates” including “workarounds” on how to continue deliveries while one of its customers said thousands of their products could go to waste.
Recent major cyber-attacks on Marks & Spencer and Co-op were larger, but the attack highlights the challenges smaller logistics firms face, an industry source said.
In an email sent on Thursday, seen by the BBC, Peter Green Chilled said it had been the victim of a ransomware attack.
A ransomware attack is when hackers encrypt a victim’s data and lock them out of computer systems, demanding payment to hand back control.
The email said no orders would be processed on Thursday, although any order prepared on Wednesday would be sent.
Peter Green Chilled confirmed to the BBC the cyber attack happened on Wednesday evening but it said 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 Peter Green Chilled’s customers, Black Farmer founder Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, said 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.”
Peter Green Chilled is a firm based near Shepton Mallet in Somerset that transports chilled food, mainly to regional stores.
There are much larger chilled food distributors in the UK – for example, Lineage, GXO, and Culina.
An industry source said these big firms, which distribute the largest volume of chilled food in the UK and internationally, have the resources to try to combat cyber attacks, while smaller firms may not.
However, 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.
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.