Not the Beer Again! Cyber Attack Paralyzes Spain’s Second Largest Brewery

Beer production was brought to a halt last week at Damm brewery, just outside Barcelona, after a cyber attack penetrated the company’s network. The attack struck the brewery on Tuesday, November 9th, and for at least a few hours, the plant in El Prat Llobregat, which produces a staggering 7 million hectolitres of beer a year, was “entirely paralyzed” said the head of communications for Damm, Olga Vidal.

This sort of headline is becoming all too common these days. In 2021 alone, we’ve seen cyber attacks of various proportions on similar companies and infrastructures such as Molson Coors, North America’s largest brewery, Bakker Logistiek, the largest supermarket in the Netherlands, the Colonial Pipeline, the main supplier of gasoline and jet fuel for the eastern half of the United States, and JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier.

Food and beverage companies, as well as most critical infrastructure, often run 24/7 with potentially catastrophic effects if the supply chain is disrupted. Keeping these businesses and entities up and running safely is a top priority for everyone involved from the CISO to the plant manager.

The combination of the critical nature of the manufacturing process and potential security vulnerabilities with OT/ICS assets, has created the perfect playground for cyber criminals. And while the precise nature of the cyber attack on Damm is yet to be disclosed, we believe that Armis is uniquely positioned to detect and respond to similar incidents.

Hackers look at the entire enterprise viewing OT, IT, IoT and IIoT devices as a single continuous system, and so should you.

Detecting cyber attacks in industrial environments cannot be based on traditional security mechanisms – or worse – network-based scans that could take down sensitive OT devices completely. It calls for a different approach.

The Armis Agentless Device Security Platform discovers, classified and identifies threats for every type of OT, IT, IoT and IIoT device in your environment — it is non-disruptive with no agents or scans required. With the Armis platform, you can:

• Get 100% visibility of every device (OT, IT, IoT & IIoT)
• Monitor device behavior to detect compromises or policy violations
• Take action to quarantine suspicious or malicious devices
• Stop attacks from moving laterally from device to device

That’s how Armis keeps your operations running, minimizing disruption and downtime.

Attacks such as the one on the Damm brewery are preventable — the Armis platform is designed to limit the ability of such bad actors from ever breaching your environment and conducting such an attack. If you want to know more about how we do this, simply request a live demo.

Learn how Armis achieved 100% visibility and 100% detection of initial access and lateral movement during the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations for ICS.