I went to the grocery store yesterday afternoon, the Tuesday after Memorial Day, and the meat case at my regular place looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Half the ground beef trays gone, the good ribeyes nowhere, and a hand-written sign taped to the shelf that just said "limited supply, we apologize." I figured it was just leftover holiday-weekend picked-over shelves. Turns out it's bigger than that.
JBS, the Brazilian company that is by a wide margin the largest meat processor on the planet, got hit with a ransomware attack over the weekend. They confirmed it Sunday. It knocked out IT systems across their US, Canadian, and Australian operations badly enough that some plants straight up stopped slaughtering and processing on Monday. We're talking about a company that handles something like a fifth of the beef supply in this country. The White House press office said Monday they believe a Russia-based criminal outfit is behind it, which, if you've been paying any attention the last three weeks, is starting to sound like a broken record.
Because obviously this is the second one. Colonial Pipeline got hit less than a month ago and half the East Coast was lining up at gas stations with empty milk jugs because they panicked and couldn't find a normal gas can. Now it's the food supply. I don't think that's a coincidence of targeting so much as it is a coincidence of exposure — these are exactly the kind of operations where a few days of downtime causes real, visible, front-page-of-the-local-paper pain, which is precisely the leverage a ransomware crew wants when they're trying to get paid fast. Hit a company nobody's heard of and they can quietly restore from backup over a long weekend. Hit the pipeline that feeds half the gas stations on I-95, or the plant that processes a fifth of the country's beef, and the pressure to just pay up and make it go away is enormous.
What's been bugging me since Colonial is how much airtime crypto speculation got this month compared to actual critical infrastructure getting repeatedly walked through the front door. Everyone I know was checking Dogecoin charts or arguing about GameStop on their lunch break, and meanwhile the systems that get gas into cars and cows into supermarkets are apparently running on networks that a criminal gang with a laptop can knock over. I'm not saying those things are unrelated exactly (ransomware payments are usually in Bitcoin, so there's a real connective thread there if you want one), but the amount of public attention on meme stocks versus the amount on "hey, our food distribution has a single point of failure that just got punched" feels backwards to me.
Anyway. I paid $11.49 for a pound and a half of ground chuck that would've been maybe $7 a few weeks ago, at least going off the receipt I still had crumpled in my glovebox from a Trader Joe's run in April. Small sample size, I know, one store, one receipt, but it's the kind of thing you notice. My dad used to grill basically every Sunday from May through September without fail, and if you'd told him back then that the reason the burger patties cost more one particular week was a hacking group somewhere overseas, he would've laughed you out of the backyard. It's such an odd, indirect way for a cyberattack to reach into somebody's actual life. Not a data breach with your password in it, not some abstract "your info may have been compromised" email. Just, the beef's more expensive this week and there isn't as much of it.
If there's a practical takeaway here it's the same boring one I've probably muttered on this blog before: patch your stuff, segment your networks, don't leave RDP open to the world, and for the love of god put 2FA on anything that touches operational systems, not just the email login. Doesn't feel like enough when you're talking about companies this size, though. I went home and finally set up 2FA on my own router admin panel, which I'd been putting off since basically forever, so at least that's one less door unlocked in my house tonight even if it does nothing for the beef supply.