In May 2021, JBS S.A., a large Brazilian-based meat processing company, wastargeted by the REvil ransomware group. The initial vector was likely a weakpassword or phishing campaign.

While the ransomware directly impacted the company’s corporate IT systems,it caused the closure of five meat processing plants across the United States,Canada, and Australia for three days. This incident demonstrates that OTshutdowns are often an involuntary consequence of an IT system collapse.Production facilities rely on IT infrastructure for critical administrative functions,such as inventory tracking, quality control logging, and logistical scheduling.

When these IT systems were encrypted and taken offline, JBS was unable tomaintain regulatory compliance or efficient operations, leading to the physicalshutdown of production lines. The company ultimately paid an $11 millionransom to restore operations.

The core operational dependency flaw could be mitigated by a Zero Trust architecture that enforces a true logical separation between IT and OT.

BlastWave’s cloaking technology ensures that the OT production network iscompletely invisible and unreachable from the corporate IT network. When theREvil ransomware encrypted the IT systems, the OT production environmentwould have remained isolated, operational, and accessible to local, authorized OTpersonnel.

This guaranteed availability would have allowed the plants to continue production, even if administrative tasks had to revert temporarily to manual processes, thereby preventing the $11 million ransom payment and the widespreadplant closures.