If you live in the Northeast, you have probably encountered a Stop & Shop grocery store. There is one not far from Your Survival Guy’s office in Newport, RI, and even three in total on tiny Aquidneck Island. Stop & Shop is owned by grocery store conglomerate, Ahold Delhaize, which also owns Food Lion, Giant, and Hannaford. The company was recently hit with a cybersecurity issue that disrupted its supply chain, leading to food shortages at certain stores. Liz Young reports in The Wall Street Journal:
The cyber incident affected Stop & Shop’s supply-chain operations, leading to shortages of fresh produce, meat and dairy products at some of the grocer’s locations in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Ahold Delhaize said the shortages are expected to be resolved by the end of this week ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. The company’s e-commerce operations including grocery delivery and pharmacy services are back up and running across all its brands, she added.
Companies face a range of cybersecurity threats and disruptions as they increase their reliance on technology for tasks such as managing inventory, filling online orders and scheduling deliveries. Cyber issues in recent years have disrupted supply chains for goods ranging from food and consumer products to medical supplies.
A ransomware attack on meatpacker JBS in 2021 knocked out production, pushed up wholesale meat prices and complicated livestock deliveries from farms.
Consumer-products manufacturer Clorox last year experienced a cyberattack that led to shortages of some products.
A blood distributor in the Southeast U.S. in July suffered a cyberattack that disrupted distribution of blood products.
Recent cyberattacks are going beyond customer data to target business operations.
Action Line: If Americans learned anything from the COVID-19 response, it’s that the supply chain is fragile. Add in a heavy reliance on internet connectivity, and that fragility is open to attack by people from around the world. Prepare yourself with redundancies and perhaps some extra inventory to smooth out the shocks from disruptions. This is especially true for drinking water supplies if you rely on delivery or town systems. If you haven’t already, click here to download my free special report: Emergency Water Storage: How Much, Containers, Purification & More.
