There was a cyberattack on JBS, the world’s largest meat producer, last weekend, affecting its Australian and North American business.

Responding to a query from the Irish Farmers Journal, JBS said: “On Sunday, May 30, JBS US determined that it was the target of an organised cybersecurity attack, affecting some of the servers supporting its North American and Australian IT systems.

“The company took immediate action, suspending all affected systems, notifying authorities and activating the company’s global network of IT professionals and third-party experts to resolve the situation. The company’s backup servers were not affected, and it is actively working with an incident response firm to restore its systems as soon as possible.”

The company is not aware of any evidence at this time that any customer, supplier or employee data has been compromised or misused as a result of the situation.

Resolution of the incident will take time, which may delay certain transactions with customers and suppliers.

JBS is headquartered in Brazil but has expanded over the past 15 years across the world, concentrating in large meat producing areas.

It has about 400 production facilities, with 250,000 employees worldwide. The company is capable of processing 75,000 cattle per day, 14m birds and 115,000 pigs across these businesses.

JBS’s turnover in 2020 was the equivalent of €41bn, 20 times the size of the entire Irish beef industry, and EBITDA (profits) of €11.5bn.