The Wolves Curdled The Milk And Now We're All Suffering
Oh good. Ransomware hit a dairy company. I haven't slept since Tuesday and now I have to write about milk.
Coca-Cola's Fairlife subsidiary got absolutely mauled by the wolves this week, resulting in a full production halt across US dairy operations. Ransomware. Classic. Someone in that flock clicked something they absolutely should not have clicked, and now the rest of us are staring at protein shake shortages and incident response timelines. Fantastic.
I want to be clear: I do not feel bad. I feel tired. There is a difference.
The Shepherds at Coca-Cola corporate have confirmed the attack, which is honestly more than most of them manage to do. Usually we get a vague statement about "a technical issue affecting some systems" while the wolves are actively redecorating the server room. So, credit where it's due, I suppose. They said the quiet part out loud.
But here's the thing that's keeping me awake. And no, it's not the coffee, I ran out of that yesterday. Fairlife processes dairy. Physical production lines. Cold storage. Logistics. When fleas get into operational technology environments, it's not just a helpdesk ticket and a reimage. It's spoiled product, broken supply chains, and some very confused lambs in procurement wondering why the milk isn't showing up.
OT ransomware is the nightmare scenario everyone in this field has been screaming about for years. The Shepherds nod politely in the quarterly meeting and then ask if we can cut the security budget. Cool. Great. Love that for us.
No confirmed attribution yet. Could be any number of wolves running ransomware-as-a-service out of a server farm somewhere. The specifics barely matter at this point. The hole in the fence exists. Something crawled through it. Milk stopped flowing. You know the drill.
I'm going to go find a flat surface to lie down on.
Remediation
Look, I'm exhausted, so I'll keep this brief.
Segment your OT networks from your IT networks. Immediately. Yesterday. Before you read this sentence.
Offline backups. Tested ones. Not "we think we have backups" backups. Real ones.
Patch your stuff. I know. I know. Shearing is annoying and it breaks things and the Shepherds complain about the maintenance window. Do it anyway.
Incident response plan. Written down. Practiced. Not a PDF from 2019 that nobody has opened.
And for the love of all that is holy, stop letting the lambs click unsolicited links. Run a phishing simulation. Make it uncomfortable. They'll hate you for it. That's fine. You're already hated.
Somewhere out there a wolf is drinking a Fairlife shake and laughing, and that's on all of us.
Original Report: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/coca-cola-says-fairlife-ransomware-attack-halts-us-dairy-production/