Last week, there was a report about some school milk shortage that happened because of a cyber-attack. The cyber-attack happened on a dairy farm up in New England, in New Hampshire. It's the HP Hood Dairy farms. They are, apparently, the largest producer, or distributor, of carton milk products. You’re probably wondering who gets carton milk products? Schools.
So, lets get into it. This is cyber-attack on Hood that could cause school lunch milk shortages for a while. Basically this boston.com article's is saying that they're going to have problems here because there's a massive cyber-attack against HP Hood Dairy, and it's caused school district in New Hampshire to start preparing for milk shortages in school lunches. Oh, no, we're going to have to drink ice tea! That's what most people always drink in school. Not many people drink milk anymore, at least white milk. Maybe chocolate milk in school these days.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR6T19lXBW0
Obviously, this could be supply chain attack, critical infrastructure, maybe, maybe not. Most experts don't know. It probably is though. It's food. But nobody's going to do anything at the federal level because of this, but it's reported a ransomware attack from what experts have heard, from the research experts have done. There has yet to seen any public confirmation of that. Experts do know, at this time, it's being called a cyber-attack, but there’s speculation that it is ransomware. Then, you have it happening with these school districts who get hit with this ransomware. Because of this ransomware supply chain attack, the school districts are being impacted, the victims, children, and school districts.
ConVal School District to be impacted by milk shortage, due to cyber-attack at dairy supplier. So, moms and dads, you're going to have to put some milk in your kid's thermos if you really want them to have milk at lunch. It safe to say just drink iced tea or anything non-milk. Also, there is another reporting of this other school district, Contoocook Valley School District is going to have a milk shortage because they get their milk from the Hood dairy farms, or HP Hood dairy farms.
This is very common when it happens to be supply chain types of attacks. Cyber experts see downstream businesses being affected. Thus, happening more and more with these cyber-attacks, where companies that rely on the services and products that these companies provide in the supply chain can't operate normally, and they have to put messages out like this, or they have to figure out other ways of doing things. As an example, this happened with the Kronos attack, with the Schedulefly attack. These are all supply chain types of attacks that happen to companies that affect the people that buy from them. This is no different than what happened with all these other supply chain attacks that is happening with this dairy farmer attack.
What this means is that you have to get to a point with this cybersecurity stuff where you're evaluating your vendors, your partners, and your clients to see when they could potentially impact your business if they have a cyber-attack. You have to assume that they're going to be breached. It is important to have plans to either go to a backup system or have a backup way of getting a product or service that you use in your business to run your business or to deliver your products and services. You got to have a backup plan. That’s just how it has to be in the world.
The other piece of this is not only do you need a backup plan, but you need to know if you can become impacted because of their poor cyber security practices. This is stuff that all businesses need to think about. They need to think about their suppliers, their partners, their vendors, and their clients dealing with a cyber-attack. There should be something inside of your business where you're evaluating this, you're evaluating how these companies may impact your business if they fall victim to a ransomware or cyber-attack, or could you end up with ransomware through one of your partners because maybe they have access to your network or something on like that. These are all things people need to consider.
And if you're really far behind on cybersecurity, you must be thinking right now, "What the hell is this guy talking about?” This is where you need to be today. There's stuff that you should've done two, three years ago. If you are not doing it yet, you're really behind the eight ball, and you're really building up, what cyber experts call here at Xact IT Solutions, technology debt that you're going to have to pay one day. Just because you don't have the bill today or nothing's happened today, doesn't mean the bill isn't going to come down the road in the form of a ransomware attack, or the form of a system crash, or the form of something else that impacts your business.
All in all, Hood dairy farms has a cyber-attack. It's going to affect the supply chain here on March 18th, 2022. Remember, to get the copy of our CEO’s new book, Check Mate, link to book is under the YouTube video.