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AGCO, a major US-based producer of agricultural machinery, has announced that it was affected by a ransomware attack that affected some of its production facilities.
Today, AGCO announced that yesterday it suffered a ransomware attack that affected some of the company’s production facilities.
While AGCO doesn’t provide any details about the cause of the outage, the company is likely to shut down parts of its IT systems to prevent the attack from spreading.
“AGCO is still investigating the scope of the attack, but its business operations are expected to be negatively impacted for several days and potentially longer to fully resume all services, depending on how quickly the company can repair its systems. The company will provide updates as the situation progresses.” -AGCO.
As the press release explains, the investigation is still ongoing and the impact of this cyberattack is expected to last for a considerable period while systems are restored.
AGCO is a giant in the field, with revenues of more than $9 billion, employing 21,000 people and owning brands such as Fendt, Massey Ferguson, Challenger, Gleaner and Valtra.
As such, any production disruption caused by the ransomware attack could have a significant supply chain impact on the production and delivery of equipment.
Bleeping Computer has contacted AGCO to request more information about the attack, but a spokesperson told us that no additional details are available.
The agricultural sector is increasingly pointing
The FBI recently warned that ransomware attacks were targeting the agricultural sector in the United States, highlighting two notable cases in 2022.
The agency issued a similar advisory in September 2021, following high-impact ransomware attacks against two large farmer cooperatives, NEW Cooperative and Crystal Valley.
All entities directly linked to national food production and supply are considered critical infrastructure and are set to make massive profits.
In the current situation, given the political tensions, this cyberattack could be motivated by retaliation, with the aim of interrupting the company’s production.
Just yesterday, AGCO announced the donation of money and seeds to farmers in war-affected areas in Ukraine, so the scenario of Russian hacktivists targeting it for this stance is not unlikely.
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