Cyberattack on Beer Giant Asahi Disrupts Production

Japanese brewing giant Asahi Group Holdings said its operations in Japan were disrupted by a cyberattack, causing system failures that affected orders and shipments across its subsidiaries and impacting call centres. Reuters reported that production at some of Asahi’s 30 domestic factories has been suspended due to the cyberattack.

According to Asahi’s notice, there has been no confirmed leakage of personal information or customer data to external parties, and the company is investigating the incident and working on restoring affected systems but could not provide a recovery timeline. The system failure is described as limited to operations within Japan, and SecurityWeek notes that the company has not disclosed the nature of the attack, though the outage could indicate file-encrypting ransomware.

Asahi owns brands including Grolsch, Peroni, Pilsner Urquell and Fullers in the UK, and the disruption is expected to have significant costs given Asahi’s market share in Japan. Written by Ionut Arghire.