Major Organic Food Distributor Faces Cyber Attack

United Natural Foods (UNFI), a major distributor of organic foods across the US, was hit by a cyberattack that caused a temporary disruption of its distribution schedule on June 9. UNFI is the primary grocery distributor to supermarket chain Whole Foods and also supplies several others retailers.

The company provides organic products to over 30,000 retailers across the US and Canada, including Walmart, Target, and others.

“The Company promptly activated its incident response plan and implemented containment measures, including proactively taking certain systems offline, which has temporarily impacted the Company’s ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders. The incident has caused, and is expected to continue to cause, temporary disruptions to the Company’s business operations,” reads a legal filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to the filing, the company originally became aware of the cyberattack on June 5. It immediately contacted the government as well as third-party cybersecurity professionals to investigate and contain the incident.

So far, UNFI has declined to provide additional information about the nature of the attack or whether the hacker(s) demanded a ransom in exchange for control of the breached systems.

Users across various social media sites posted about how the disruption affected their local supermarkets. A Reddit post titled “Thanks UNFI” simply shows empty shelves in a refrigerated section.

In a June 13 update, the company posted: “We have continued to make steady progress to safely restore our systems throughout the week and are now shipping and receiving products out of the vast majority of UNFI distribution centers.”

“We expect to gradually increase our operational capacity over the next few days, including the ability to accept electronic orders. We will also continue to use manual workarounds to meet our customers’ needs wherever necessary.”

The UNFI disruption shows just one of the many ways in which cyberattacks can affect regular people. In April, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a warning to Americans about the Medusa Ransomware network, which has impacted over 300 victims.